Childhood Cancer Cluster Simulation - Cancer in Brief Manuscript Schündeln et al. 2020

Incidence of newly diagnosed childhood cancer (140/1,000,000 children under 15 years) and nephroblastoma (7/1,000,000) was simulated. Clusters of defined size (1 to 50) were randomly assembled on the district level in Germany. Each cluster was simulated with ten different relative risk levels (1 to 100). For each combination 2000 iterations were done. Simulated data was then analysed by three local clustering tests: Besag-Newell (BN) method, spatial scan statistic (SSS) and Bayesian Besag-York-Mollié with Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation approach (BYM). RAW DATA: The simulated raw data is reported in the Rdata files: "ChildhoodCancerSimulationData.Rdata" and "ChildhoodNephroblastomaSimulationData.Rdata". These files contain 6 lists for the different cluster sizes ("Cluster Size X"). Within each of these lists 2000 simulations for clusters in 10 different risk levels ("RR Y Cluster") and the corresponding simulated cases for each of the respective scenario ("RR Y SimCases") are found. ANALYSED DATA: The operating characteristics of each of the various cluster detection methods and scenarios in this study is reported according to the quality criteria detailed below ("Analyzed Data - Data in Brief.xlsx") Minimum Power (MP): Proportion of simulations detecting at least one district of the true cluster. Exact Power (EP): Proportion of simulations detecting the true cluster without false positives. Sensitivity (sens): Proportion of correctly detected districts in the true cluster. Specificity (spec): Percentage of normal risk districts, correctly classified as normal risk districts. Positive predictive value (PPV): Proportion of districts in the detected cluster belonging to the true cluster. Negative predictive value (NPV): Proportion of districts not labeled as a risk cluster that is not part of the true cluster. Correct classification (CC): Percentage of correctly classified districts of all districts. Correct proportion (CP): Correctly labeled districts of all detected potential high-risk districts. Positive diagnostic likelihood (PDL): The ratio of high-risk districts being detected, divided by the probability non-high-risk districts being detected (sensitivity / (1-specificity). Negative diagnostic likelihood (NDL): The ratio of high-risk districts not being detected divided by the probability of non-high-risk districts not being detected ((1 – sensitivity) /specificity). False positive rate (FPR): Incorrectly labeled high-risk districts of all detected high-risk districts False negative rate (FNR): Incorrectly labeled normal-risk districts of all detected normal-risk districts