Ethan Wood Research Project

Ethan Wood (UNC STOR undergrad)

Title: Analyzing Arsenic and Water Quality with MaxBET

Abstract:
The United States Environmental Protection Agency published a paper and a dataset focusing on measured levels of arsenic in community water systems (CWS) per county and instances of cancer in those respective counties. By applying MaxBET to the dataset the EPA published, I found non-linear relationships between both weighted and unweighted levels of arsenic, and water quality. Rather than there existing a simple linear relationship between water quality and measured arsenic, there exists a parabolic relationship between weighted arsenic and water quality and a horizontal parabolic relationship between unweighted arsenic and water quality. The non-linearity of the weighted arsenic might be explained by its formula, which depends on the population of the county, but the unweighted arsenic seems to be slightly more complicated. Viewing clusters of states and regions in the US appears to provide a possible explanation for non-linearity, due to arsenic being geogenic in origin. Further research will be continued to see how this geogenic quality of arsenic applies to instances of cancer in each county.