SaTScan Datasets

The SaTScan software comes with seven small sample data sets that are automatically downloaded together with the software. Described in the SaTScan User Guide, these are recommended for conducting a first SaTScan trial for different types of data and analyses, just to make sure that the program is running. They are also useful as examples of the SaTScan input data formats. They are not meant for scientific or teaching purposes.

This web page provides links to additional data sets that has been used in SaTScan Tutorials and various SaTScan related publications, either for epidemiological analyses or for simulated power calculations. These may be used for educational as well as research purposes.

SaTScan Tutorial Data Sets

• Cancer Incidence in New York State, Purely Spatial
  • Talbot T, Kumar S, Kulldorff M. SaTScan Tutorial #1: Purely Spatial Poisson Scan Statistic for Cancer Incidence, version 1.0. Albany, NY, USA, 2014.
• Birth Defect Data in New York State, Purely Spatial
  • Talbot T, Kumar S, Kulldorff M. SaTScan Tutorial #2: Purely Spatial Bernoulli Scan Statistic for Birth Defects, version 1.0. Albany, NY, USA, 2015.
• Colorectal Cancer in New York State, Ordinal Scan Statistic
  • Boscoe F, Kulldorff M. SaTScan Tutorial #4: Ordinal Scan Statistic for Identifying Unusual Cancer Stage Patterns, version 1.0. Albany, NY, USA, 2017.
• United States Population Data, Multinomial Scan Statistic
  • Boscoe F, Kulldorff M. SaTScan Tutorial #5: Multinomial Scan Statistic for Identifying Unusual Population Age Structures, version 1.0. Albany, NY, USA, 2018.

Epidemiological Data Used in SaTScan Publications

• Brain Cancer Incidence in New Mexico
  • Kulldorff M, Athas W, Feuer E, Miller B, Key C. Evaluating cluster alarms: A space-time scan statistic and brain cancer in Los Alamos. American Journal of Public Health, 1998;88:1377-1380.
• Lung Cancer Incidence in New Mexico
  • Kulldorff M, Hjalmars U. The Knox method and other tests for space-time interaction. Biometrics, 1999;55:544-552.

Benchmark Data for Statistical Power Evaluations

• Northeastern USA Benchmark Data, Purely Spatial
  • Kulldorff M, Tango T, Park PJ. Power comparisons for disease clustering tests. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 2003,42:665-684.
  • Song C, Kulldorff M. Power evaluation of disease clustering tests. International Journal of Health Geographics, 2003,2:9.
• New York City Benchmark Data, Disease Outbreaks (external link)
  • Kulldorff M, Zhang Z, Hartman J, Heffernan R, Huang L, Mostashari F. Evaluating disease outbreak detection methods: Benchmark data and power calculations. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 2004, 53:144-151.