Spatial-temporal modelling of spatially aggregate birth data

Births by census division are studied via graphs and maps for the province of Saskatchewan for the years 1986-87. The goal of the work is to see how births are related to time and geography by obtaining contour maps that display the birth phenomenon in a smooth fashion. A principal difficulty arising is that the data are aggregate. A secondary goal is to examine the extent to which the Poisson-lognormal can replace for data that are counts, the normal regression model for continuous variates. To this end a hierarchy of models for count-valued random variates are fit to the birth data by maximum likelihood. These models include: the simple Poisson, the Poisson with year and weekday effects and the Poisson-lognormal with year and weekday effects. The use of the Poisson-lognormal is motivated by the idea that important covariates are unavailable to include in the fitting. As the discussion indicates, the work is preliminary.