Description:
The following description is taken from the R vignette by Roger Bivand (linked to as a resource in this dataset)
This dataset was presented first in Symons et al. (1983), analysed with reference to the spatial nature of the data in Cressie and Read (1985), expanded in Cressie and Chan (1989), and used in detail in Cressie (1991). It is for the 100 counties of North Carolina, and includes counts of numbers of live births (also non-white live births) and numbers of sudden infant deaths, for the July 1, 1974 to June 30, 1978 and July 1, 1979 to June 30, 1984 periods.
Spatio-temporal addition:
In this dataset we include the 'spatial-only' 1974--1978 period but also add a spatio-temporal version of the second period (1979 -- 1984). These latter data were studied in detail in a recent work by Zhuang and Cressie (2012).
References:
Cressie, N., 1991. Statistics for spatial data. New York: Wiley, pp. 900
Cressie, N., Chan N. H., 1989. Spatial modelling of regional variables. Journal of
the American Statistical Association, 84 (406), 393–401.
Cressie, N., Read, T. R. C., 1985. Do sudden infant deaths come in clusters?. Statistics and Decisions, Supplement Issue 2, 333–349
Symons, M. J., Grimson, R. C., Yuan, Y. C., 1983. Clustering of rare events. Bio-
metrics, 39 (1), 193–205.
Zhuang, L. and Cressie, N., 2012. Spatio-temporal modeling of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome data. Statistical Methodology, 9, 117–143.