Laura F White

Laura F White

she/her

Professor of Biostatistics; infectious diseases; substance use disorder research

Substance use disorders

Building on our initial effort to undestand the prevalence of Opioid Use Disorder using capture recapture methods in a highly cited paper in the American Journal of Public Health, we have worked to improve methods for prevalence estimation in this hard to reach population. We use multiple systems data methods to estimate prevalence in an attempt to understand the size of the population not captured by any data sources.

Software/Code

Comparison of multiple systems prevalence estimation methods

We have done a careful analytic and simulation-based comparison of the two most common methods to estimate the size of a hidden population: Multipler based methods and Capture Recapture methods. We show the conditions under which these methods are equivalent, and importantly, when they are not equivalent. The paper is published in Statistical Methods in Medical Research and can he found here. Code for this project is available here.

Spatially granular prevalence estimates

We have developed an approach inspired by capture recapture methods to perform small area estimation of prevalence. This fully bayesian approach can estimate prevalence in the presence of sparse data by leveraging spatial correlation between areas. Code for this method is found here and the paper describing this is under review.

Subgroup prevalence estimates

Estimating our spatially granular estimation framework, we have developed an approach to estimate the prevalence among subgroups. A notable feature of this method is that it allows one to estimate the sampling probability for each sub group. In large administrative datasets, we often assumed that everyone is equally likely to be sampled, but our results reveal striking differences in representation of different groups, indicating differential access to healthcare and government services. The code for this is under development here. This manuscript is in progress.

References