{"title":"A BAYESIAN HIERARCHICAL MODEL FOR COMBINING MULTIPLE DATA SOURCES IN POPULATION SIZE ESTIMATION.","authors":"Jacob Parsons, Xiaoyue Niu, Le Bao","doi":"10.1214/21-AOAS1556","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>To combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic effectively, targeted interventions among certain key populations play a critical role. Examples of such key populations include sex workers, people who inject drugs, and men who have sex with men. While having accurate estimates for the size of these key populations is important, any attempt to directly contact or count members of these populations is difficult. As a result, indirect methods are used to produce size estimates. Multiple approaches for estimating the size of such populations have been suggested but often give conflicting results. It is, therefore, necessary to have a principled way to combine and reconcile these estimates. To this end, we present a Bayesian hierarchical model for estimating the size of key populations that combines multiple estimates from different sources of information. The proposed model makes use of multiple years of data and explicitly models the systematic error in the data sources used. We use the model to estimate the size of people who inject drugs in Ukraine. We evaluate the appropriateness of the model and compare the contribution of each data source to the final estimates.</p>","PeriodicalId":50772,"journal":{"name":"Annals of Applied Statistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10150643/pdf/nihms-1889948.pdf","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Annals of Applied Statistics","FirstCategoryId":"100","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1214/21-AOAS1556","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2022/7/19 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"STATISTICS & PROBABILITY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
To combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic effectively, targeted interventions among certain key populations play a critical role. Examples of such key populations include sex workers, people who inject drugs, and men who have sex with men. While having accurate estimates for the size of these key populations is important, any attempt to directly contact or count members of these populations is difficult. As a result, indirect methods are used to produce size estimates. Multiple approaches for estimating the size of such populations have been suggested but often give conflicting results. It is, therefore, necessary to have a principled way to combine and reconcile these estimates. To this end, we present a Bayesian hierarchical model for estimating the size of key populations that combines multiple estimates from different sources of information. The proposed model makes use of multiple years of data and explicitly models the systematic error in the data sources used. We use the model to estimate the size of people who inject drugs in Ukraine. We evaluate the appropriateness of the model and compare the contribution of each data source to the final estimates.
期刊介绍:
Statistical research spans an enormous range from direct subject-matter collaborations to pure mathematical theory. The Annals of Applied Statistics, the newest journal from the IMS, is aimed at papers in the applied half of this range. Published quarterly in both print and electronic form, our goal is to provide a timely and unified forum for all areas of applied statistics.