A Markov chain modeling approach for predicting relative risks of spatial clusters in public health

Predicting relative risk (RR) of spatial clusters is a complex task in public health that can be achieved through various statistical and machine-learning methods for different time intervals. However, high-resolution longitudinal data is often unavailable to successfully apply such methods. The goal of the present study is to further develop and test a new methodology proposed in our previous work for accurate sequential RR predictions in the case of limited longitudinal data. In particular, we first use a well-known likelihood ratio test to identify significant spatial clusters over user-defined time intervals. Then we apply a Markov chain modeling approach to predict RR values for each time interval. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed approach yields better performance with COVID-19 morbidity data compared to the previous study on mortality data. Additionally, increasing the number of time intervals enhances the accuracy of the proposed Markov chain modeling method.