A tutorial on spatio-temporal disease risk modelling in R using Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation and the CARBayesST package

Population-level disease risk varies in space and time, and is typically estimated using aggregated disease count data relating to a set of non-overlapping areal units for multiple consecutive time periods. A large research base of statistical models and corresponding software has been developed for such data, with most analyses being undertaken in a Bayesian setting using either Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation or integrated nested Laplace approximations (INLA). This paper presents a tutorial for undertaking spatio-temporal disease modelling using MCMC simulation, utilising the CARBayesST package in the R software environment. The tutorial describes the complete modelling journey, starting with data input, wrangling and visualisation, before focusing on model fitting, model assessment and results presentation. It is illustrated by a new case study of pneumonia mortality at the local authority level in England, and answers important public health questions including the effect of covariate risk factors, spatio-temporal trends, and health inequalities