查看文章

Background:

Procedures for calculating deprivation indices in epidemiologic studies often show some common problems because the spatial dependence between units of analysis and uncertainty of the estimates is not usually accounted for. This work highlights these problems and illustrates how spatial factor Bayesian modeling could alleviate them.

Methods:

This study applies a cross-sectional ecological design to analyze the census tracts of 3 Spanish cities. To calculate the deprivation index, we used 5 socioeconomic indicators that comprise the deprivation index calculated in the MEDEA project. The deprivation index was estimated by a Bayesian factor analysis using hierarchical models, which takes the spatial dependence of the study units into account. We studied the relationship between this index and the one obtained using principal component analysis. Various analyses were carried out to assess the …