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Using Weights of Evidence (WofE) in a GIS for the Prediction of Tuberculosis Cases: Application of a New ArcView Extension Author: Paul Van Zuyle 2323 Knoll Dr. Phone: (805) 677-5205 Recent advances in the implementation of statistical software for GIS have made possible new applications for public health. The "Weights of Evidence" (WofE) technique is an application of Bayes' rule for calculating posterior probabilities. A geographic application for mineral exploration was described by Bonham-Carter et al. in 1988 and implemented in an ArcView GIS extension in 1999. In this study, disease occurrences and population characteristics from the census have been input in order to calculate the probability of tuberculosis cases in various parts of Ventura County, California. Since multiple years of TB incidence data at the address level were obtained for the study, the predictions of the model have been compared against actual incidence. The results have been made available to public health workers through ArcView Internet Map Server. |