In recent years, spatial and spatio-temporal modelling have become an important area of research in many fields (epidemiology, environmental studies, disease mapping, ...). However, most of the models developed are constrained by the large amounts of data available. We propose the use of...

Penalized splines (P-splines) and individual random effects are used for the analysis of spatial count data. P-splines are represented as mixed models to give a unified approach to the model estimation procedure. First, a model where the spatial variation is modelled by a two-dimensional...