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发展解决服务分配公平基本方面的方法。服务分配公平是研究人口获得服务的机会，这些服务被认为对促进经济发展、改善健康和提高某一地理区域内人口的一般生活质量至关重要。本建议侧重于严谨的方法，以解决服务分配公平的三个重要维度：度量、关联和变革的催化剂。为了满足数据建模的需求，以扩展到用于解决服务分布不平等的数据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，这些方法以计算效率的方式严格考虑数据依赖关系。统计方法是有理论基础的，一般适用于服务业研究的其他研究。该项目侧重于金融服务（存款和贷款）和保健服务（初级、专业和紧急护理），但一般适用于在多个地点和由多个提供者提供的其他服务活动。识别和解决服务分配中的不平等将创造经济发展机会，并改善公民的整体健康，而不受人口特征的影响。因此，这项研究最终将影响历史上被剥夺获得基本服务机会的人口群体，并最终减少与服务分配不平等有关的差距。此外，这项研究将以严谨的方法对服务分配公平领域作出贡献，这将有助于影响政策所需的定量论证，并将以一般的时空方法对统计领域作出贡献，这可以应用于许多其他问题。

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.