Translation-invariant functional clustering on COVID-19 deaths adjusted on population risk factors

International audienceThe COVID-19 pandemic has taken the world by storm with its high infection rate. Investigating its geographical disparities has paramount interest in order to gauge its relationships with political decisions, economic indicators, or mental health. This paper focuses on clustering the daily death rates reported in several regions of Europe and the United States over seventeen months. Several methods have been developed to cluster such functional data. However, these methods are not translation-invariant and thus cannot handle different times of arrivals of the disease, nor can they consider external covariates and so are unable to adjust for the population risk factors of each region. We propose a novel three steps clustering method to circumvent these issues. As a first step, feature extraction is performed by translation-invariant wavelet decomposition which permits to deal with the different onsets. As a second step, single-index regression is used to neutralize disparities caused by population risk factors. As a third step, a nonparametric mixture is fitted on the regression residuals to achieve the region clustering

Satellite

The fifth generation (5G) wireless communication systems development has brought about a paradigm shift using advanced technologies; including softwarization, virtualization, massive MIMO, and ultradensification, in addition to introducing new frequency bands. However, as societal needs for any form of information grow, it is necessary to satisfy the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Migrations to 6G and beyond systems are envisioned to provide augmented capacity, so massive IoT, with better performance relying on optimization made possible by artificial intelligence, it is absolutely necessary. Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs), including satellite systems, High-Altitude Platforms (HAPs), and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), provide the best solutions to connect the unconnected, unserved, and underserved in remote and rural areas. Over the past few decades, Geo Synchronous Orbits (GSO) satellite systems have been deployed to support broadband services, backhauling, Disaster Recovery and Continuity of Operations (DR-COOP), and emergency services. Recently, novel non-GSO satellite systems are attracting significant interest. Within the next few years, several thousands of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites and mega-LEO constellations will provide global internet services, offering user throughput comparable to terrestrial mobile or fixed access networks. This report represents the 2023 Edition of the INGR Satellite Working Group Report, following the previous three editions [1]–[3]. This edition of the INGR Satellite Working Group Report addresses NTN and 6G more in detail, adding further contributions on optical wireless communications, artificial intelligence techniques, seamless handover, security, and recent standardization efforts given the prospected unification of terrestrial and NTN components of 6G