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Activity Number: 388
Type: Contributed
Date/Time: Wednesday, August 9, 2006 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
Abstract - #305705
Title: P-Values for the Besag-Newell Cluster Detection Test
Author(s): Ronald Gangnon*+
Companies: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Address: 603 WARF, Madison, WI, 53726,
Keywords: cluster detection ; likelihood principle ; p-value adjustment
Abstract:

Besag and Newell (1991) proposed a focused cluster detection method based on the number of nearest neighbor geographic regions, l, that need to be aggregated to include a prespecified minimum number of cases, k. Besag and Newell calculated their p-value based solely on the number of regions included in the cluster (l), ignoring the actual number of cases (y) included in the identified cluster. We consider several methods for computing the p-value for the cluster identified by the Besag-Newell procedure based on different orderings of the bivariate outcome space (y,l). We compare the methods with respect to the degree to which each captures the strength of evidence against the null hypothesis implied by the data. We conclude that the ordering of the sample space induced by the observed likelihood ratio statistic has the most desirable operating characteristics.

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