Cancer Mortality Rates for US Counties: Are they Reliable and Predictable?

We examine US County-level observational data on Cancer Mortality and it's "Top Ten" potential causes from Federal or State sources for the two individual years (2012 and 2016) that we have made publicly available. We find that these two Cancer Mortality rates for individual years have remarkably little in common, and we propose using a simple composite measure of cancer mortality that has several advantages. The vast majority of our new findings have simple implications that we illustrate graphically.