CP*Trends When searching for clues as to what sorts of factors are driving cancer rates, it is often useful to examine whether the rates differ more by year of birth (i.e. birth cohort) or calendar year (i.e. period). For some cancers this is fairly obvious. For example: Smoking rates differ by birth cohort, and so do lung cancer rates The rapid introduction of the PSA screening…

“Head-banging” is a weighted two-dimensional median-based smoothing algorithm, developed to reveal underlying geographic patterns in data where the values to be smoothed do not have equal variances. The original idea was proposed by Tukey and Tukey (1981), then studied and implemented by Hansen (1991). The staff at the National Center for Health Statistics worked with Hansen to add weights to the…

A Catalogue of Genetic Simulation Resources

CI*Rank The CI*Rank website presents ranked, age-adjusted cancer incidence and mortality rates by state, county, and special region in the US. The site also presents confidence intervals for those ranks. Ranked, age-adjusted US mortality rates for other causes of death are also provided, along with the confidence intervals. Results presented in CI*Rank help show the usefulness of…

CanSurv version 1.4 was released May 30, 2018 and includes an update to output options. The new options provide more flexibility for other programs to read the calculated results. CanSurv is a statistical software to analyze population-based survival data. For grouped survival data, it can fit both the standard survival models and the mixture cure survival models and provides various graphs for…