Bayesian Prediction of Mean Indoor Radon Concentrations for Minnesota Counties
Past efforts to identify areas having higher than average indoor radon concentrations by examining the statistical relationship between local mean concentrations and physical parameters such as the soil radium concentration have been hampered by the noise in local means caused by the small number of homes monitored in some or most areas, In the present paper, indoor radon data from a survey in Minnesota are analyzed in such a way as to minimize the effect of finite sample size within counties, in order to determine the true county-to-county variation of indoor radon concentrations in the state and the extent to which this variation is explained by the variation in surficial radium concentration among counties, The analysis uses hierarchical modeling, in which some parameters of interest (such as county geometric mean (GM) radon concentrations) are assumed to be drawn from a single population, for which the distributional parameters are estimated from the data. Extensions of this technique, known as a random effects regression and mixed effects regression, are used to determine the relationship between predictive variables and indoor radon concentrations; the results are used to refine the predictions of each county's radon levels, resulting in a great decrease in uncertainty. The true county-to-county variation of GM radon levels is found to be substantially less than the county-to-county variation of the observed GMs, much of which is due to the small sample size in each county. The variation in the logarithm of surficial radium content is shown to explain approximately 80% of the variation of the logarithm of GM radon concentration among counties. The influences of housing and measurement factors, such as whether the monitored home has a basement and whether the measurement was made in a basement, are also discussed. This approach offers a self-consistent statistical method for predicting the mean values of indoor radon concentrations or other geographically distributed environmental parameters.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- Environmental Energy Technologies Division
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC02-05CH11231
- OSTI ID:
- 1009818
- Report Number(s):
- LBL-35818; HLTPAO; TRN: US201106%%1020
- Journal Information:
- Health Physics, Journal Name: Health Physics; ISSN 0017-9078
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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