Abstract
Cancer is a major public health problem in all over the world and including Libya. Over the ten years hugs advances have been made in the field of relative risk. In this research, relative risk estimation is the focus of our attention. Relative risk estimation is one of the most important issues in the study of geographical distributions of disease occurrence or disease mapping. For the case of breast cancer and its application in Libya, there are not many researches that use statistical methods to estimate the relative risk for disease mapping in Libya. Therefore, the aim of this study is to estimate the relative risk for breast cancer disease based on the most common statistic used in disease mapping "Standardized Morbidity Ratio (SMR)" and compare it with summary method during period from 2015 to 2020. The estimation of relative risk is applied to breast cancer data in Libya which will then be displayed in a map to represent the high and low risk areas of breast cancer occurrence. This research starts by providing a review of the SMR method, which we then apply to breast cancer data in Libya. We then make a comparison of the SMR method and summary method both results are displayed and compared using graphs, tables and maps. Results of the analysis shows that the SMR method gives a better relative risk estimates compared with using the summary method. Generally, Although SMR is not the best method to estimate risk; it can overcome the problems of mapping by using smoothing models. The drawbacks of this model have motivated many researchers to propose other alternative methods for estimating the relative risk.