• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.561-575
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• 2014

In this paper, we propose a penalized likelihood method to detect local spatial clusters associated with disease. The key computational algorithm is based on genlasso by Tibshirani and Taylor (2011). The proposed method has two main advantages over Kulldorff's method which is popoular to detect local spatial clusters. First, it is not needed to specify a proper cluster size a priori. Second, any type of covariate can be incorporated and, it is possible to find local spatial clusters adjusted for some demographic variables. We illustrate our proposed method using tuberculosis data from Seoul.