EXPLORATORY TOOLS FOR DISEASE MAPPING IN GEOGRAPHICAL EPIDEMIOLOGY

In the present paper a new shrinkage estimator of relative risk, usefu l in disease mapping, is compared with the empirical and full Bayes es timators, using death certificate data for lung cancer (males and fema les) and breast cancer (females) 1982-1988 in the Emilia-Romagna regio n (Italy). The estimates are obtained averaging the relative risks obt ained from recursive partitioning of the set of observed values. The n umber of partitions is fixed in advance and behaves as a smoothing par ameter, the lower the number the higher the degree of shrinkage toward the overall mean of the observed values.