Visualization of Disease Surveillance Data with Geostatistics

Kriging techniques are used to map national public health data routinely reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Although choropleth maps are commonly used to display geographic and temporal disease-related events for political (state and county) jurisdictions, kriged maps may offer opportunities to enhance visual communication of event patterns over time. As a geostatistical modeling technique, kriging takes into account the existing underlying spatial structure of georeferenced information to produce statistically robust estimates of the pattern and standard errors of an underlying phenomenon. This geostatistical technique is applied to model estimates of reported cases by state of Lyme disease.