86 research outputs found
A municipality-level analysis of excess mortality in Italy in the period January-April 2020
BACKGROUND: the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 in WHO European Region was reported at the end of January 2020 and, from that moment, the epidemic has been speeding up and rapidly spreading across Europe. The health, social, and economic consequences of the pandemic are difficult to evaluate, since there are many scientific uncertainties and unknowns. OBJECTIVES: the main focus of this paper is on statistical methods for profiling municipalities by excess mortality, directly or indirectly caused by COVID-19. METHODS: the use of excess mortality for all causes has been advocated as a measure of impact less vulnerable to biases. In this paper, observed mortality for all causes at municipality level in Italy in the period January-April 2020 was compared to the mortality observed in the corresponding period in the previous 5 years (2015-2019). Mortality data were made available by the Ministry of Internal Affairs Italian National Resident Population Demographic Archive and the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat). For each municipality, the posterior predictive distribution under a hierarchical null model was obtained. From the posterior predictive distribution, we obtained excess death counts, attributable community rates and q-values. Full Bayesian models implemented via MCMC simulations were used. RESULTS: absolute number of excess deaths highlights the burden paid by major cities to the pandemic. The Attributable Community Rate provides a detailed picture of the spread of the pandemic among the municipalities of Lombardy, Piedmont, and Emilia-Romagna Regions. Using Q-values, it is clearly recognizable evidence of an excess of mortality from late February to April 2020 in a very geographically scattered number of municipalities. A trade-off between false discoveries and false non-discoveries shows the different values of public health actions. CONCLUSIONS: despite the variety of approaches to calculate excess mortality, this study provides an original methodological approach to profile municipalities with excess deaths accounting for spatial and temporal uncertainty
Big Data and Causality
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Causality analysis continues to remain one of the fundamental research questions and the ultimate objective for a tremendous amount of scientific studies. In line with the rapid progress of science and technology, the age of big data has significantly influenced the causality analysis on various disciplines especially for the last decade due to the fact that the complexity and difficulty on identifying causality among big data has dramatically increased. Data mining, the process of uncovering hidden information from big data is now an important tool for causality analysis, and has been extensively exploited by scholars around the world. The primary aim of this paper is to provide a concise review of the causality analysis in big data. To this end the paper reviews recent significant applications of data mining techniques in causality analysis covering a substantial quantity of research to date, presented in chronological order with an overview table of data mining applications in causality analysis domain as a reference directory
An early warning information system for militarised interstate conflicts Combining the interactive liberal peace proposition with neural network modelling
SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN045279 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
Sensitivity analysis of the relationship between disease occurrence and distance from a putative source of pollution
The relation between disease risk and a point source of pollution is usually investigated using distance from
the source as a proxy of exposure. The analysis may be based on case-control data or on aggregated data. The definition
of the function relating risk of disease and distance is critical, both in a classical and in a Bayesian framework,
because the likelihood is usually very flat, even with large amounts of data. In this paper we investigate how the
specification of the function relating risk of disease with distance from the source and of the prior distributions on the
parameters of the function affects the results when case-control data and Bayesian methods are used. We consider different
popular parametric models for the risk distance function in a Bayesian approach, comparing estimates with those
derived by maximum likelihood. As an example we have analyzed the relationship between a putative source of environmental
pollution (an asbestos cement plant) and the occurrence of pleural malignant mesothelioma in the area of
Casale Monferrato (Italy) in 1987-1993. Risk of pleural malignant mesothelioma turns out to be strongly related to
distance from the asbestos cement plant. However, as the models appeared to be sensitive to modeling choices, we suggest
that any analysis of disease risk around a putative source should be integrated with a careful sensitivity analysis
and possibly with prior knowledge. The choice of prior distribution is extremely important and should be based on epidemiological
consideration
The association between risk of disease and point sources of pollution: a test for case-control data
- âŠ