Pesticide Exposure & Respiratory Health

Risk levels for COPD and asthma across the U.S., based on pesticide data.

County map — asthma & COPD risk

Colors show relative risk levels for the selected outcome using 2019 county predictions from the final tuned XGBoost (Full_pesticides_raw features), produced by the same external holdout validation pipeline as the model card when the site data is built from predictions_all_counties.csv (see map legend for the exact layer note). Toggle Asthma or COPD to recolor; popups show predicted vs. observed (CDC PLACES) where available.

How to interpret “risk percentile”

Each county gets a risk rank and risk percentile based on its predicted prevalence for the selected outcome (Asthma / COPD), compared to all other counties in the map dataset for that year.

  • Higher risk percentile = higher predicted prevalence (e.g., 95th percentile means the county’s prediction is higher than ~95% of counties).
  • Risk rank #1 = highest predicted prevalence (highest relative risk on this map).
  • This is a relative comparison across counties, not an absolute probability of exposure or a clinical diagnosis.