title: Comparing INLA and OpenBUGS for hierarchical Poisson modeling in disease mapping.
abstract: The recently developed R package INLA (Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation) is becoming a more widely used package for Bayesian inference. The INLA software has been promoted as a fast alternative to MCMC for disease mapping applications. Here, we compare the INLA package to the MCMC approach by way of the BRugs package in R, which calls OpenBUGS. We focus on the Poisson data model commonly used for disease mapping. Ultimately, INLA is a computationally efficient way of implementing Bayesian methods and returns nearly identical estimates for fixed parameters in comparison to OpenBUGS, but falls short in recovering the true estimates for the random effects, their precisions, and model goodness of fit measures under the default settings. We assumed default settings for ground truth parameters, and through altering these default settings in our simulation study, we were able to recover estimates comparable to those produced in OpenBUGS under the same assumptions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Public Health, Medical University of South Carolina, 135 Cannon St, Charleston, SC 29425, USA. Electronic address: mosra@musc.edu.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Carroll
authors.affiliation: Department of Public Health, Medical University of South Carolina, 135 Cannon St, Charleston, SC 29425, USA.
authors.forename: A B
authors.initials: AB
authors.lastname: Lawson
authors.affiliation: Interuniversity Institute for Statistics and Statistical Bioinformatics, Hasselt University, Agoralaan 1, 3590 Diepenbeek, Belgium.
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Faes
authors.affiliation: Department of Community and Family Health, University of Southern Florida, 13201 Bruce B Downs Blvd MDC 56, Tampa, FL 33612, USA.
authors.forename: R S
authors.initials: RS
authors.lastname: Kirby
authors.affiliation: Department of Public Health, Medical University of South Carolina, 135 Cannon St, Charleston, SC 29425, USA.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Aregay
authors.affiliation: Interuniversity Institute for Statistics and Statistical Bioinformatics, Hasselt University, Agoralaan 1, 3590 Diepenbeek, Belgium.
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Watjou
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D004812:Epidemiologic Methods; D006801:Humans; D008390:Markov Chains; D015233:Models, Statistical; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D016012:Poisson Distribution; D012984:Software; D062211:Spatio-Temporal Analysis
keywords: BRugs; Bayesian; Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation; MCMC; Poisson; Spatial