Estimating missing breast cancer mortality rates for the females in the USA

Breast cancer is the most diagnosed cancer and the second most common cause of morbidity and mortality among women in the United States.Despite the substantial progress in reducing breast cancer mortality in the US over the past decades, disparities are still exit, especially among Black women.Continued surveillance and the study of breast cancer are essential to monitor progress, evaluate policies, and inform cancer control strategies.However, a complete and clean data set is sometimes unavailable for analysis despite every effort, posing challenges in the study and negatively affecting decision making in the related areas.The breast cancer mortality rates for the US females by race are obtained from 1990 to 2023 from National Cancer Institute (NCI).In this study, we implement functional data analysis approach to estimate the missing values.The method can estimate the values even when one or few observations are available with high degrees of confidence and the residulas are statistically significant at 0.05 level.The model estimates a continuous decline in the breast cancer mortality rates for Asian Pacific Islander women, while the rates remain stable for black and American Indian/Alaska Native women.