Production-grade spatial epidemiology, engineered for public health

Start here: hands-on deep dives

Copy-ready, validated walkthroughs — the fastest way into each pipeline stage.

• Fundamentals Building a HIPAA-Compliant Spatial Metadata Schema This guide solves one narrow operational problem: turning the HIPAA Privacy Rule's geographic-identifier limits into a machine-enforceable metadata schema…
• Fundamentals How to Align WGS84 and UTM for County Health Data This guide solves one specific failure mode: case-level coordinates arriving in WGS84 (EPSG:4326) that must be deterministically joined to county boundaries…
• Fundamentals Setting Decimal Precision for Disease Coordinate Mapping This guide solves one narrow operational problem: enforcing a fixed, defensible number of decimal places on case coordinates at ingestion, so that spatial…
• Fundamentals Converting Shapefiles to GeoJSON for Epi Pipelines <script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "Article", "headline": "Converting Shapefiles to GeoJSON for…
• Fundamentals Handling Island Polygons in Spatial Weights A single polygon with no contiguity neighbors — an offshore county, a district the boundary file failed to snap — will crash row-standardization and quietly…
• Fundamentals Queen vs Rook Contiguity Weights in libpysal Queen and Rook contiguity look interchangeable and are not: on the same polygons they build different neighbor sets, and that difference changes the value…
• Disease Clustering Choosing Adaptive vs Fixed Bandwidth for GWR A fixed-distance bandwidth applies the same kernel radius to every unit, which starves data-sparse rural counties of neighbors while over-smoothing dense…
• Disease Clustering Fitting GWR for Disease-Rate Covariates in Python When a global regression reports one coefficient for poverty on disease incidence, it collapses every regional regime into a single average — and that…
• Disease Clustering Optimizing Bandwidth for Getis-Ord Gi* Heatmaps This guide solves one narrow problem: choosing the spatial weights bandwidth for a Getis-Ord Gi heatmap by metric-driven search instead of visual guesswork,…
• Disease Clustering Calculating Local Moran's I for Infectious Disease Outbreaks This guide solves one narrow but high-stakes problem: running a defensible, audit-ready Local Moran's I (LISA) computation on infectious disease incidence…
• Disease Clustering Implementing Ripley's K-Function in Python for Vector-Borne Diseases This guide solves one narrow problem: computing a defensible, edge-corrected, significance-tested Ripley's K-function on vector-borne disease (VBD) point…
• Disease Clustering Choosing Between Spatial Lag and Spatial Error Models Analysts too often pick a spatial lag or spatial error model by habit — whichever they fit last time — when the choice should follow the robust Lagrange…
• Disease Clustering Diagnosing Spatial Autocorrelation in Regression Residuals A clean-looking OLS on county health rates — high $R^2$, tidy coefficients, small p-values — routinely hides residuals that cluster in space, and when they…
• Disease Clustering Configuring SaTScan for Retrospective Cluster Detection This guide solves one narrow operational problem: generating a deterministic, audit-defensible SaTScan .prm parameter file for a retrospective space-time…
• Healthcare Access Caching OSRM Route Matrices for Large Batches Recomputing an entire origin-destination duration matrix on every pipeline run wastes OSRM engine time and invites timeouts at agency scale, a…
• Healthcare Access Handling API Timeouts in Batch OSM Routing This guide solves one specific failure: keeping a large origin-destination (OD) travel-time job complete and reproducible when an OSM routing engine returns…
• Healthcare Access Generating 15-Minute Walk Isochrones for Rural Clinics This guide solves one narrow but recurring problem: producing defensible 15-minute pedestrian service areas around rural clinics when the underlying walk…
• Healthcare Access Reconciling ESRI and OSRM CRS in Isochrone Generation When you overlay an ESRI Network Analyst service area on an open-source OSRM isochrone during drive-time isochrone generation, the two polygons that should…
• Healthcare Access Balancing Facility Loads with Linear Assignment Assigning every population unit to its nearest facility overloads popular sites and leaves others idle, a problem the broader facility capacity allocation…
• Healthcare Access Modeling Hospital Bed Capacity with Network Analysis This guide solves a single operational problem: assigning surge-period patient origins to hospital beds using impedance-weighted road routing that reacts to…
• Healthcare Access Calculating the Two-Step Floating Catchment Area Index This guide solves one specific problem: computing a defensible Two-Step Floating Catchment Area (2SFCA) accessibility score from a network travel-time…
• Healthcare Access Choosing Distance-Decay Functions for 2SFCA The enhanced two-step floating catchment area score computed in the spatial equity index calculation section is acutely sensitive to the distance-decay…
• Privacy Analytics Dasymetric Refinement with Land-Use Ancillary Data Areal-weighted interpolation assumes population is spread uniformly across a polygon, so a rate denominator built that way is wrong wherever a unit contains…
• Privacy Analytics Small-Count Cell Suppression in Choropleth Rate Maps Mapping raw disease rates leaks every cell whose numerator sits below the suppression threshold, and hiding those cells one at a time is reversible from the…
• Privacy Analytics Adding Laplace Noise to Census-Tract Case Counts Releasing exact case counts per census tract is disclosive: a small cell effectively announces individuals, and several such tables let an attacker…
• Privacy Analytics Allocating a Privacy Budget Across Nested Geographies Releasing counts at state, county, and tract level from the same individuals is not three independent releases — the privacy loss composes, and spending a…
• Privacy Analytics Donut Geomasking for Patient Address Points This guide, part of Geographic Masking Techniques, solves one specific weakness of naive geomasking: a simple random displacement can leave a masked patient…
• Privacy Analytics Validating Geomasks with Spatial K-Anonymity Part of Geographic Masking Techniques, this guide covers the step most masking pipelines skip: proving the mask worked. A displacement radius is an input to…
• Privacy Analytics Adaptive Areal Aggregation for Rare-Disease Counts Fixed census-tract reporting leaves most rare-disease cells below a publishable threshold, so a region-growing merge that absorbs contiguous neighbors until…
• Privacy Analytics Enforcing Spatial K-Anonymity on Case-Point Releases Publishing a case-point map can silently violate k-anonymity in low-density areas even after coordinates are jittered, because the disc that actually…