Spatial Demography

United Nations Subnational Under-five Mortality Estimates, 1990–2019

• In close coordination with the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Mortality Estimation (UN IGME) we have produced subnational estimates.
• The team was lead by Jon Wakefield and Jessica Godwin and included Zehang Richard Li, Julianne Meisner, Taylor Okonek, Johnny Paige, Peter Gao, Geir-Arne Fuglstad, Miranda Fix, Andrea Riebler, Sam Clark, Tracy Dong, Yunhan Wu, Ziyu Jiang, Orvalho Augusto, Serge Aleshin-Guendel, Avi Kenny and Yue Chu. Valuable input was given by Lucia Hug, Danzhen You and Dave Sharrow of UN IGME and the UN IGME Technical Advisory Group (TAG), in particular Jon Pedersen, Trevor Croft and Patrick Gerland.
• The methods are described in the brochure that can be downloaded from here and in the papers below, in particular, Wakefield et al. (2019) and Wakefield, Okonek and Pedersen (2020).
• The estimates were obtained using the SUMMER package, available at CRAN: SUMMER

WHO Excess Mortality during the Pandemic

• The revised paper and supplement describing the methods used to estimate global and country-specific excess mortality are here and here. The paper and supplement discuss the estimates for India, Germany and Sweden in detail.
• Full results are at WHO site.
• Media Coverage: here
• Since February 2021 I've been part of the World Health Organizaion (WHO) Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on COVID-19 Mortality Assessment, and leading the model development efforts to produce estimates of excess mortality over the course of the pandemic.
• In particular, I have worked closely with William Msemburi (WHO, Geneva, Switzerland), Victoria Knutson (Department of Biostatistics, UW), Serge Aleshin-Guendel (Department of Biostatistics, UW) and Ariel Karlinsky (Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel).
• More details on the TAG are here.

Software

• Software, including for small area estimation, can be found here.

Papers: The majority of these papers are available on arXiv here.

• G.-A. Fuglstad, R.Z. Li and J. Wakefield (2021). The Two Cultures for Prevalence Mapping: Small Area Estimation and Spatial Statistics. arXiv paper.
• T. Dong and J. Wakefield (2021). Modeling and presentation of vaccination coverage estimates using data from household surveys. Vaccine, 39, 2584-2594.
• Wilson, K. and Wakefield, J. (2021). Estimation of health and demographic indicators with incomplete geographic information. To appear, Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology.
• Marquez, N. and Wakefield, J. (2021). Harmonizing child mortality data at disparate geographic levels. Statistical Methods in Medical Research, Published online February 1.
• Godwin, J. and Wakefield, J. (2021). Space-Time Modeling of child mortality at the admin-2 level in a low and middle income countries context. Statistics in Medicine. Published 14 February, 2021.
• Wilson. K. and Wakefield, J. (2021). Child Mortality Estimation Incorporating Summary Birth History Data. Biometrics. Published online 24 September 2020.
• Wakefield, J., Okonek, T. and Pedersen, J. (2020). Small area estimation for disease prevalence mapping. International Statistical Review, 88, 398-418.
• Wakefield, J. (2020). Prevalence mapping Wiley Online Encyclopedia. Paper.
• Wilson. K. and Wakefield, J. (2020). A model-based alternative to the Brass method. To appear Demographic Research.
• Schumacher, A.E., McCormick, T., Wakefield, J., Chu, Y., Perin, J., Villavicencio, F., Simon, N. and Liu, L. (2020). A flexible Bayesian framework to estimate age- and cause-specific child mortality over time from sample registration data. To appear Annalos of Applied Statistics.
• Paige, J., Fuglstad, G.-A., Riebler, A. and Wakefield, J. (2020). Design- and Model-Based Approaches to Small-Area Estimation in a Low and Middle Income Country Context: Comparisons and Recommendations. Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology. Published 4 September, 2021.
• Wilson. K. and Wakefield, J. (2020). Child Mortality Estimation Incorporating Summary Birth History Data. To appear Biometrics.
• Wakefield, J., Fuglstad, G.-A., Riebler, A., Godwin, J., Wilson, K. and Clark, S.J. (2019). Estimating under five mortality in space and time in a developing world context. Statistical Methods in Medical Research, 28, 2614-2634. Paper and Supplement
• Li, Z, Hsiao, Y., Godwin, J., Martin, B., Wakefield, J. and Clark. (2019). Changes in the Spatial Distribution of the Under-Five Mortality Rate: Small-area Analysis of 122 DHS Surveys in 262 Subregions of 35 Countries in Africa. PLoS One. Published: January 22, 2019. Paper available at PLoS One Website
• Wilson, K. and Wakefield, J. (2018). Pointless spatial modeling. Biostatistics. Published online 6 September, 2018. Paper and Supplement
• Mercer, L., Wakefield, J., Pantazis, A., Lutambi, A., Masanja, H. and Clark, S. (2015). Small area estimation of child mortality in the absence of vital registration. Annals of Applied Statistics, 9, 1889-1905. Paper is here.

Lectures and Short Courses

• Lectures, given by Jon Wakefield and Richard Zehang Li, on ``Bayesian Subnational Estimation using Complex Survey Data":
  • Videos can be found here: here.
  • Lecture 1 (Jon): Overview, Motivation and Survey Sampling: Slides.
  • Lecture 2 (Jon): Bayesian Inference and Smoothing Models: Slides.
  • Lecture 3 (Jon): Spatial Models for Survey Data: Slides.
  • Lecture 4 (Richard): Introduction to R, Overview, Analysis, Codes.
  • Lecture 5 (Richard): Space-time Smoothing in R, Overview, Analysis, Codes.
  • Lecture 6 (Richard): Case Study - Kenya 2014 DHS, Overview, Analysis, Codes.
• Materials from a short course Jon gave on Small Area Estimation are here: CSSS Short Course

Inspiration

• Montrose: Space Station No 5