A wealth of epidemiological data suggests an association between
mortality/morbidity from pulmonary and cardiovascular adverse events and air
pollution, but uncertainty remains as to the extent implied by those
associations although the abundance of the data. In this paper we describe an
SSA (Singular Spectrum Analysis) based approach in order to decompose the
time-series of particulate matter concentration into a set of exposure
variables, each one representing a different timescale. We implement our
methodology to investigate both acute and long-term effects of PM10​
exposure on morbidity from respiratory causes within the urban area of Bari,
Italy.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-EJS123 the Electronic
Journal of Statistics (http://www.i-journals.org/ejs/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org