Geospatial Factors and Impacts: Measurement and Use
Project Description
This project involves the development of spatial regression methods, the implementation of these methods in software and their application to the study of health seeking behavior in collaboration with the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) International project team.
Spatial econometric methods will be developed that allow the incorporation of geospatial/socio-cultural factors in the study of health-seeking behavior, in both person level and small area analysis. These methods deal with the specification and estimation of spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity in models of discrete choice, such as spatial probit and spatial tobit models. Estimation methods will include maximum likelihood as well as method of moments estimators, approached from a simulation perspective. The latter requires high performance computing. The methods will be prototyped in the statistical package R, in Python code and implemented in the open source software package OpenGeoDa. This will include the evaluation of possible parallelization algorithms to allow the analysis of very large data sets.
The methods and software will be applied to the estimation of behavioral models that will form the basis for agent-based simulation models.
The work will be carried out over a period of four years.
ASU Project Staff
The project is directed by Dr. Luc Anselin. He will exclusively focus on the development of new spatial econometric methods required for the project, the design of software to implement these methods and to collaborate closely with Dr. Lee Mobley at the Research Triangle Institute on the empirical applications. In addition, Dr. Anselin will supervise a Research Programmer, Charles Schmidt, and Doctoral Research Assistant. The Research Programmer will carry out high end numerical programming and algorithm development. This individual will also collaborate with Dr. Anselin in the development of parallelization and geocomputational methods to optimize the code for application. The Doctoral Research Assistant will focus primarily on the development of web materials, data manipulation and analysis, and assist in the support of the project's web environment. In addition, Dr. Ibnu Syabri has collaborated on the OpenGeoDa development as a visiting scholar.
Funding
This project is funded by the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) International under Subgrant Number 1-312-0210849. The prime sponsor is the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01CA126858-01A1. The initial funding period is from August 2007 through May 2008.