The below map gives a hot spot distribution of heart disease rates by county in the southern United States. The data for this map was taken from CDC Wonder for the year 2016. The total deaths from heart disease were divided by the total population of the county to find the heart disease rate and normalize the data. Also a spatial weights matrix was created using the 8 nearest neighbors to run the hot spot analysis. Since this is a big dataset, and before zeroing in on 2016 I looked at years 1999 to 2016, models were created in Modelbuilder to process all of the data. The first model was designed to separate the data into 18 yearly classes and process it year by year. The second model used a hot spot analysis tool to define statistically significant hot and cold spots with confidence levels of 90%, 95% and 99%.

By looking at the results of the hot spot distribution we can immediately identify that Oklahoma has the highest concentration of heart disease cases out of all the other southern United States. The east coast and Texas have some of the lower concentrations. Further data and analysis is needed in order to determine the causes of such spatial variations of heart disease rates. Perhaps the concentration of hot spots in Oklahoma could be due to older population, poverty, unhealthy diets, poor air quality, higher caffeine consumption, or even genetically predisposed population. It could also be due to infrastructural distributions and by this I mean a higher concentration of nursing homes and heart disease centers. Any or all of these factors could play a role in determining the patterns, however that information was not available to us for the purposes of this assignment. Overall Oklahoma seems like a problematic state in terms of heart disease fatalities and I would suggest moving to Maryland which seems to be the less troubled according to this map.