CAREER: Service Distribution Equity using Spatio-Temporal Statistical Foundations

这个教师早期职业发展（CAREER）项目的研究目标是推进和开发方法，解决服务分配公平的基本方面。服务分配公平性是研究人口获得服务的情况，这些服务被认为是促进经济发展、改善健康和提高特定地理区域内人口总体生活质量的根本。这项建议的重点是严格的方法，以解决服务分配公平的三个重要方面：衡量，协会和催化剂的变化。为了满足数据建模的需求，扩展到解决服务分布不平等的数据所固有的维度和依赖关系，该研究项目包括一系列新的建模多变量方法，这些方法以计算高效的方式严格考虑数据依赖关系。统计方法具有一定的理论基础，并普遍适用于服务业的其他研究。该项目的重点是金融服务（存款和贷款）和医疗保健服务（初级、专业和紧急护理），但通常也适用于分布在多个地点和由多个提供者提供的其他服务活动，查明和解决服务分配中的不公平现象将创造经济发展机会，并在不偏袒人口特征的情况下改善公民的总体健康。因此，这项研究将最终影响到历史上被剥夺了获得基本服务的机会的人口群体，并最终减少与服务分配不平等有关的差距。此外，这项研究将有助于严格的方法，服务分配公平领域，这将有助于影响政策所需的定量论证，并与一般的时空方法的统计领域，可以应用到许多其他问题。

The research objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project is to advance and develop methodology that addresses fundamental aspects of service distribution equity. Service distribution equity is the study of a population's access to services that are considered fundamental in fostering economic development, improving wellness and enhancing the general quality of life of a population within a given geographic area. This proposal focuses on rigorous methodology to address three important dimensions of service distribution equity: Measurement, Association and Catalysts of Change. To meet the needs of data modeling that scales to the dimensionality and dependencies intrinsic to the data used in addressing service distribution inequity, the research project includes a series of new modeling multivariate methods that rigorously account for data dependencies in a computationally efficient way. The statistical methods are theoretically-founded and generally apply to other studies in service industry research. This project focuses on financial services (deposit and lending) and healthcare services (primary, specialized and emergency care), but generally applies to other service activities which are distributed at multiple sites and by multiple providers.Identifying and addressing inequities in service distribution will create economic development opportunities as well as improve overall wellness of citizen without bias regarding demographic characteristics. Consequently, this research will ultimately impact population groups which historically have been deprived of access to fundamental services and eventually reduce the disparities associated with service distribution inequities. Moreover, this research will contribute with rigorous methodology to the field of service distribution equity, which will aid in the quantitative argumentation needed to influence policy, and with general spatio-temporal methodology to the field of statistics which can be applied to many other problems.