Abstract

In real life situations, the values of the response variable, which is the count data is mostly under-reported. In this work, we develop a model to cater for under-reporting in the case of count data. In particular, we allow under-reporting to vary spatially by regions through a probability captured by a binomial distribution. Count data mostly comes with a common property, which is the variance is greater than mean. When this happens, the recommended distribution is Negative Binomial (NB) instead of the usual Poisson distribution. The spatial variations of the disease were divided into correlated and uncorrelated parts. When a Negative Binomial was used, both the correlated and uncorrelated parts were all found to share a significant relationship with the relative risk for each region with more of contribution coming from the uncorrelated part. The model obtained was applied to diabetes data in Ghana. Disease maps for the diseases were also developed for Ghana. These maps are critical and informative to policy makers when coming up with preventive mechanisms in the face of scarce resources.

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