GIS-Based Local Spatial Statistical Model of Cholera Occurrence: Using Geographically Weighted Regression

Global statistical techniques often assume homogeneity of relationships between dependent variable and predictors across space. This assumption has been criticized by statistical geographers as a fundamental weakness that may yield misleading result when it is applied to dataset with spatial context. To strengthen this weakness, a new method that accounts for heterogeneity in relationships across geographic space has been presented. This is one of the family of local spatial statistical techniques referred to as geographically weighted regression (GWR). The method captures non-stationarity of relationship in spatial data that the ordinary least square (OLS) regression fails to account for. Thus, the paper is designed to explore and analyze the spatial relationships between cholera occurrence and household sources of water supply using GIS-based GWR, also to compare the modeling fitness of OLS and GWR. Vector dataset (spatial) of the study region by state levels and statistical data (non-spatial) on cholera cases, household sources of water supply and population data were used in this exploratory analysis. The result shows that GWR is a significant improvement on the global model. Comparing both models with the AICc value and the R2 value revealed that for the former, the value is reduced from 698.7 (for OLS model) to 691.5 (for GWR model). For the latter, OLS explained 66.4 percent while GWR explained 86.7 percent. This implies that local model’s fitness is higher than global model. In addition, the empirical analysis revealed that cholera occurrence in the study region is significantly associated with household sources of water supply. This relationship, as detected by GWR, largely varies across the region.