PhD: Dealing with spatial misalignment to model the relationship between deprivation and life expectancy in Liverpool: A model-based geostatistical approach
This paper is a part of a single PhD “Geostatistical Methods for Modelling Spatially Aggregated Data”
Life expectancy at birth (LEB), one of the main indicators of human longevity, has often been used to characterise the health status of a population.
Understanding its relationships with deprivation is key to develop policies and evaluate interventions that are aimed at reducing health inequalities.
However, methodological challenges in the analysis of LEB data arise from the fact that different Government agencies often provide spatially aggregated information on LEB and the index of multiple deprivation (IMD) at different spatial scales.
Our objective is to develop a geostatistical framework that, unlike existing methods of inference, allows us to carry out spatially continuous prediction while dealing with spatial misalignment of the areal-level data.