A new class of minimum power divergence estimators with applications to cancer surveillance

The Annual Percent Change (APC) has been adopted as a useful measure for analyzing the changing trends of cancer mortality and incidence rates by the NCI SEER program. Difficulties, however, arise when comparing the sample APCs between two overlapping regions because of the induced dependence (e.g., comparing the cancer mortality change rate of California with the national level). This paper deals with a new perspective of understanding the …