Prediction of U.S. Cancer Mortality Counts Using Semiparametric Bayesian Techniques.

We present two models for the short-term prediction of the number of deaths arising from common cancers in the United States. The first is a local linear model, in which the slope of the segment joining the number of deaths for any two consecutive time period is assumed to be random with a nonparametric distribution, which has a Dirichlet process prior. For slightly longer prediction periods, we present a local quadratic model. This extension of the local linear model includes an additional "acceleration" term that allows it to quickly adjust to sudden changes in the time series. The proposed models can be used to obtain the predictive distributions of the future number of deaths. as well their meals and variances through Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques. We illustrate our methods by runs on data from selected cancer sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]