Bayesian Analysis for Heat Effects on Mortality

In this paper, we introduce a hierarchical Bayesian model to simultaneously estimate the thresholds of each 6 cities. It was noted in the literature there was a dramatic increases in the number of deaths if the mean temperature passes a certain value (that we call a threshold). We estimate the difference of mortality before and after the threshold. For the hierarchical Bayesian analysis, some proper prior distribution of parameters and hyper-parameters are assumed. By combining the Gibbs and Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, we constructed a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm and the posterior inference was based on the posterior sample. The analysis shows that the estimates of the threshold are located at $25^{\circ}C{\sim}29^{\circ}C$ and the mortality around the threshold changes from -1% to 2~13%.