ABSTRACT
In many situations the retrospective analysis of disease maps is a major focus. In fact in previous chapters the analysis described has been applied to a retrospective collection of health outcomes. By retrospective I mean that the temporal labels of events are already known, i.e. we know the history of the process. There are situations where there is a need to consider how new data will be characterized and how well we can predict new events. In application to disease maps, we would be focused on the prediction of (say) counts of asthma in census tracts in 2013, when we only have counts up to 2012. This is in essence prospective analysis of disease outcomes.
