Chawarat Rotejanaprasert

Thanks Sri Budi Fajariyan for you comments. Alcohol consumption and substance use are much related to mental health which can well lead to suicide… Risk factors of mental health and suicide are generally multi-factorial. I agree economic variables are much related to suicide and depression…. Hope you find the tools you learn in this course are…[Read more]

Hello Karina, Thank you for your comments. Economic variables have been to known to relate to suicide. The results on suicide reflect that the culture in Thailand perhaps also has an effect on suicide rates. I agree that spatial analyses such as cluster detection can be applied to this issue which you’ll learn in next week! I just also learned…[Read more]

Hello Sri Budi Fajariyani and Karina, I agree that the spatial health data have limited availability due to various due to various factors; one of which is confidentiality. Moreover, spatial analyses for health data have been well developed and accessible for non-technical users for only in the last decades. Nonetheless, you will explore the…[Read more]

Hello Hazem, you raised a couple of good points. Data confidentiality and completeness are main issues in spatial epidemiology. Most spatial health data are available at aggregate level. Although at a coarse scale, spatial health data can well be incomplete partly due to the infrastructure of surveillance system. However we will also analyze…[Read more]

In this class we mainly focus on areal health data which have different names you may come across such as small area or aggregate data. Unfortunately the point data (with exact location) are not covered in this class. The models for those types are slightly different. However we can discuss if you need that tool for your research. Good comment!

The analysis was using secondary aggregate-level data. So the design would be retrospective and ecological.

Great comments! I am aware of the issues appearing on the paper. Actually another type of modeling for counts and rates will be introduced next week and I also plan for each student to discuss the model assumptions and propose an alternative which are essentially what you just did! So perhaps it would be beneficial for the class to have…[Read more]

Hello Napisa, There are no format requirements for weekly assignments, however you can find the general guideline for class project report on the course overview page: https://mu-informatics.org/courses/statistical-methods-in-spatial-epidemiology/lessons/course-orientation/#1593763833294-8e838bd2-a559

Please focus on the content and do not spend…[Read more]

As you all mentioned and agreed, this field is interdisciplinary, there are lessons I have learned and continue to learn… That would be great and I would be honored if this class can be a part of what you need in your work. So please feel free to raise any concerns and hope your fellow classmates can help and support each other. 🙂

Like…[Read more]

Great comments. I really enjoy what you mentioned!

The literature uses the phrases which you might come cross in the future, e.g., geographical epidemiology, spatial epidemiology, and medical geography, to describe a dynamic body of theory and analytic methods concerned with the study of spatial patterns of disease incidence and mortality.…[Read more]

The R version may need an update when the package has changed in a way that is incompatible with the version of R you have installed. Glad you find a way to solve the issue. Cheers!

Hello, One could use the spatial index for pre-processing which can improve the computing significantly for large datasets. However since our dataset is quite small, it would not matter much without a spatial index for our class assignments. Great comments! Keep up the good work!

Hello all, shapefiles have mandatory and optional files. The mandatory file extensions needed for a shapefile are .shp, .shx and .dbf, and others are optional files. The main file is .shp that gives features of their geometry. Every shapefile has its own .shp file that represents spatial vector data. For example, it could be points, lines and…[Read more]

Hello, the assignment is aimed to display the number of cases or incidence. However it is ok if you already did morbidity. The point is for you to know how to display epidemiological data on map.

Good explanation! Please let me know if you have further issues.

Thank you both. You can pick any clay earthy tone. Nonetheless, the color coding on that one wasn’t clear indeed. No worries about the issue with grading. I understand what you tried to do!

Hello, the figure on page 27 is an example of the map you could get before changing the symbology. However I can see confusion in the outline color of West_boundary. The default was red for the version we used and so was the screenshot captured. However you can use black or red for the outline color of West_boundary. No worries, you won’t be…[Read more]

QGIS can also run on Mac or Linux, and you are welcome to use them; however, only Windows instructions are given in these lesson materials. If you get hung up and ain’t so familiar with the systems, you may be expected to spend sometime troubleshooting or default to a Windows machine in order to complete the exercises. I’m not a Mac/Linux expert…[Read more]

Hello all, the examples and tutorials in this course have been developed and tested with the long term version 3.10 (the most recent at the time) and things on your screen can look slightly different to what is shown in the images in each practical. However most of them should be sufficient you can follow. Please let us know though if you have…[Read more]