Spatio-Temporal Disaggregation with Changing Areal Boundaries

Abstract: Small area estimation and disease mapping increasingly rely on areal data where reporting boundaries change over time. We develop a computationally efficient spatio-temporal disaggregation method to recover high-resolution risk surfaces from observed counts under changing boundaries. Our approach extends the spatially aggregated log-Gaussian Cox process and uses the Extended Latent Gaussian Model framework for fast approximate posterior inference. We replace standard lognormal polygon-specific effects with gamma-distributed overdispersion which yields a marginal negative binomial likelihood, and removes one latent variable per polygon-time pair. We illustrate the approach by mapping mortality risk across shifting NUTS-3 boundaries in Belgium and the Netherlands. For the purpose of dissemination we use Codex to leverage the methodology presented in this paper for the analysis of a separate data set concerning the city of Manchester. The methodology is implemented in the open-source R package DAST.