Integrating Temporal Disaggregation and Distributed Lag Nonlinear Models for Bayesian Spatio-Temporal Disease Mapping with High-Resolution Environmental Exposures

2026-08-20

AI Summary

该研究通过结合时间分解和分布式滞后非线性模型，提出了一种贝叶斯时空框架，以解决疟疾传播中健康结果与环境暴露之间的时间错位问题。

Abstract

Environmental conditions are major drivers of malaria transmission, but epidemiological analyses are often constrained by temporal misalignment between health outcomes reported at coarse time scales and environmental exposures available at finer resolutions. Conventional approaches aggregate environmental data to match health outcomes, potentially obscuring delayed and nonlinear relationships. We propose a Bayesian spatio-temporal framework that addresses this limitation through a latent daily disease process linked to observed monthly malaria counts by temporal disaggregation. The framework integrates distributed lag nonlinear models for climatic effects, spatio-temporal random effects, and intervention covariates within a unified hierarchical model. The methodology was applied to malaria surveillance data from 161 districts in Mozambique between 2017 and 2024, integrating temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, vegetation, elevation, and malaria interventions. Compared with a conventional monthly model, the proposed framework improved predictive accuracy and uncertainty quantification while exploiting the temporal resolution of environmental data. Estimated relationships showed nonlinear associations between climatic variability and malaria incidence, including an optimal temperature range, increasing risk with positive vegetation anomalies, and nonlinear precipitation effects. By avoiding temporal aggregation of environmental exposures, the framework provides a flexible approach for investigating delayed environmental effects from routine surveillance data and can be extended to other environmentally sensitive diseases with mismatched temporal resolutions.

Problem

• temporal misalignment
• environmental exposures
• malaria transmission
• spatio-temporal disease mapping
• Bayesian framework

Innovation

• Bayesian spatio-temporal framework
• temporal disaggregation
• distributed lag nonlinear models
• environmental exposures