Jointly estimating cause-specific mortality: US small area forecasts

Published March 5, 2014

Previous analyses of cause-specific mortality in the United States have either focused on just one or a few causes of death or have analyzed national trends. We extend this work to describe cause-specific mortality in the US by county, age, sex, year, and a collectively exhaustive set of conditions. First, we describe trends in causes of death across these five dimensions. Next, we use novel Bayesian small area modeling techniques to jointly estimate and forecast cause-specific mortality. Finally, we present cutting-edge data visualizations to explore the results and convey them to a broader audience.