Ecological studies are based on characteristics of groups of individuals, which are common in various disciplines including epidemiology. It is of great interest for epidemiologists to study the geographical variation of a disease by accounting for the positive spatial dependence between...

In this paper, the goal of identifying disease subgroups based on differences in observed symptom profile is considered. Commonly referred to as phenotype identification, solutions to this task often involve the application of unsupervised clustering techniques. In this paper, we investigate the...