Fig. 1.

Schematic framework for spatial measure errors in spatial epidemiology. For Location (①), the geographic coordinates are used as an example here. In practice, the Cartesian coordinates can be used instead, which is the coordinates used in the process of data analysis; For Outcome (②), a dichotomous variable is used for an example and only one column is needed. Other types of Outcome variables can also have more than one dimension, such as Poisson data, that may include a numerator (e.g., number of cases) and denominator (population at risk). For simplicity, only one column is used to indicate the Outcome. The Covariates (③) may be any combination of categorical or continuous variables. The error caused by the correspondence between Outcome and Covariates is marked as ④