scholarly journals Alleviating confounding in spatio-temporal areal models with an application on crimes against women in India

2021 ◽  
pp. 1471082X2110154
Author(s):  
Aritz Adin ◽  
Tomás Goicoa ◽  
James S. Hodges ◽  
Patrick M. Schnell ◽  
María D. Ugarte

Assessing associations between a response of interest and a set of covariates in spatial areal models is the leitmotiv of ecological regression. However, the presence of spatially correlated random effects can mask or even bias estimates of such associations due to confounding effects if they are not carefully handled. Though potentially harmful, confounding issues have often been ignored in practice leading to wrong conclusions about the underlying associations between the response and the covariates. In spatio-temporal areal models, the temporal dimension may emerge as a new source of confounding, and the problem may be even worse. In this work, we propose two approaches to deal with confounding of fixed effects by spatial and temporal random effects, while obtaining good model predictions. In particular, restricted regression and an apparently—though in fact not—equivalent procedure using constraints are proposed within both fully Bayes and empirical Bayes approaches. The methods are compared in terms of fixed-effect estimates and model selection criteria. The techniques are used to assess the association between dowry deaths and certain socio-demographic covariates in the districts of Uttar Pradesh, India.

2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 371-386
Author(s):  
Visha Sharma ◽  
◽  
Mohammad Ishtiaque ◽  
Dimple Kumar ◽  
◽  
...  

The crime against women is a subject of great concern globally but in the Indian context it much alarming especially in Uttar Pradesh. According to the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) report 2018, 378277 cases of crime against women were reported in India up from 359849 in 2017 and Uttar Pradesh topped the list with 59445 cases. The present paper is an attempt to show a Spatio-temporal analysis of crimes against women in Uttar Pradesh. The analysis is based on the secondary data that was collected from the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB)and the Census of India. The main objective of this research is to show the trend and patterns of crimes against women in the state. Correlation technique has been used to analyse the data and maps have been prepared based on the calculated results. To perform the correlation several demographic variables have been selected to understand the degree of crimes against women. The results of the research work differed for variables as some of them have a strong positive relationship while others have negative. It is to be noted that sex-ratio and literacy the variables have a strong positive correlation with the crimes in the majority of the districts of the study area.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (10) ◽  
pp. 1421-1440 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Vicente ◽  
T. Goicoa ◽  
M. D. Ugarte

Abstract Multivariate models for spatial count data are currently receiving attention in disease mapping to model two or more diseases jointly. They have been thoroughly studied from a theoretical point of view, but their use in practice is still limited because they are computationally expensive and, in general, they are not implemented in standard software to be used routinely. Here, a new multivariate proposal, based on the recently derived M models for spatial data, is developed for spatio-temporal areal data. The model takes account of the correlation between the spatial and temporal patterns of the phenomena being studied, and it also includes spatio-temporal interactions. Though multivariate models have been traditionally fitted using Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques, here we propose to adopt integrated nested Laplace approximations to speed up computations as results obtained using both fitting techniques were nearly identical. The techniques are used to analyse two forms of crimes against women in India. In particular, we focus on the joint analysis of rapes and dowry deaths in Uttar Pradesh, the most populated Indian state, during the years 2001–2014.


2012 ◽  
Vol 69 (11) ◽  
pp. 1881-1893 ◽  
Author(s):  
Verena M. Trenkel ◽  
Mark V. Bravington ◽  
Pascal Lorance

Catch curves are widely used to estimate total mortality for exploited marine populations. The usual population dynamics model assumes constant recruitment across years and constant total mortality. We extend this to include annual recruitment and annual total mortality. Recruitment is treated as an uncorrelated random effect, while total mortality is modelled by a random walk. Data requirements are minimal as only proportions-at-age and total catches are needed. We obtain the effective sample size for aggregated proportion-at-age data based on fitting Dirichlet-multinomial distributions to the raw sampling data. Parameter estimation is carried out by approximate likelihood. We use simulations to study parameter estimability and estimation bias of four model versions, including models treating mortality as fixed effects and misspecified models. All model versions were, in general, estimable, though for certain parameter values or replicate runs they were not. Relative estimation bias of final year total mortalities and depletion rates were lower for the proposed random effects model compared with the fixed effects version for total mortality. The model is demonstrated for the case of blue ling (Molva dypterygia) to the west of the British Isles for the period 1988 to 2011.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Chad Hazlett ◽  
Leonard Wainstein

Abstract When working with grouped data, investigators may choose between “fixed effects” models (FE) with specialized (e.g., cluster-robust) standard errors, or “multilevel models” (MLMs) employing “random effects.” We review the claims given in published works regarding this choice, then clarify how these approaches work and compare by showing that: (i) random effects employed in MLMs are simply “regularized” fixed effects; (ii) unmodified MLMs are consequently susceptible to bias—but there is a longstanding remedy; and (iii) the “default” MLM standard errors rely on narrow assumptions that can lead to undercoverage in many settings. Our review of over 100 papers using MLM in political science, education, and sociology show that these “known” concerns have been widely ignored in practice. We describe how to debias MLM’s coefficient estimates, and provide an option to more flexibly estimate their standard errors. Most illuminating, once MLMs are adjusted in these two ways the point estimate and standard error for the target coefficient are exactly equal to those of the analogous FE model with cluster-robust standard errors. For investigators working with observational data and who are interested only in inference on the target coefficient, either approach is equally appropriate and preferable to uncorrected MLM.


2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hui Meng ◽  
Yunping Zhou ◽  
Yunxia Jiang

AbstractObjectivesThe results of existing studies on bisphenol A (BPA) and puberty timing did not reach a consensus. Thereby we performed this meta-analytic study to explore the association between BPA exposure in urine and puberty timing.MethodsMeta-analysis of the pooled odds ratios (OR), prevalence ratios (PR) or hazards ratios (HR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) were calculated and estimated using fixed-effects or random-effects models based on between-study heterogeneity.ResultsA total of 10 studies involving 5621 subjects were finally included. The meta-analysis showed that BPA exposure was weakly associated with thelarche (PR: 0.96, 95% CI: 0.93–0.99), while no association was found between BPA exposure and menarche (HR: 0.99, 95% CI: 0.89–1.12; OR: 1.02, 95% CI: 0.73–1.43), and pubarche (OR: 1.00, 95% CI: 0.79–1.26; PR: 1.00, 95% CI: 0.95–1.05).ConclusionsThere was no strong correlation between BPA exposure and puberty timing. Further studies with large sample sizes are needed to verify the relationship between BPA and puberty timing.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Lee ◽  
Kitty Meeks ◽  
William Pettersson

AbstractSpatio-temporal count data relating to a set of non-overlapping areal units are prevalent in many fields, including epidemiology and social science. The spatial autocorrelation inherent in these data is typically modelled by a set of random effects that are assigned a conditional autoregressive prior distribution, which is a special case of a Gaussian Markov random field. The autocorrelation structure implied by this model depends on a binary neighbourhood matrix, where two random effects are assumed to be partially autocorrelated if their areal units share a common border, and are conditionally independent otherwise. This paper proposes a novel graph-based optimisation algorithm for estimating either a static or a temporally varying neighbourhood matrix for the data that better represents its spatial correlation structure, by viewing the areal units as the vertices of a graph and the neighbour relations as the set of edges. The improved estimation performance of our methodology compared to the commonly used border sharing rule is evidenced by simulation, before the method is applied to a new respiratory disease surveillance study in Scotland between 2011 and 2017.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 3099
Author(s):  
V. Javier Traver ◽  
Judith Zorío ◽  
Luis A. Leiva

Temporal salience considers how visual attention varies over time. Although visual salience has been widely studied from a spatial perspective, its temporal dimension has been mostly ignored, despite arguably being of utmost importance to understand the temporal evolution of attention on dynamic contents. To address this gap, we proposed Glimpse, a novel measure to compute temporal salience based on the observer-spatio-temporal consistency of raw gaze data. The measure is conceptually simple, training free, and provides a semantically meaningful quantification of visual attention over time. As an extension, we explored scoring algorithms to estimate temporal salience from spatial salience maps predicted with existing computational models. However, these approaches generally fall short when compared with our proposed gaze-based measure. Glimpse could serve as the basis for several downstream tasks such as segmentation or summarization of videos. Glimpse’s software and data are publicly available.


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