Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series Commons^™

Forecasting Covid-19 With Temporal Hierarchies And Ensemble Methods, Li Shandross

Masters Theses

Infectious disease forecasting efforts underwent rapid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing guidance for pandemic response and about potential future trends. Yet despite their importance, short-term forecasting models often struggled to produce accurate real-time predictions of this complex and rapidly changing system. This gap in accuracy persisted into the pandemic and warrants the exploration and testing of new methods to glean fresh insights.

In this work, we examined the application of the temporal hierarchical forecasting (THieF) methodology to probabilistic forecasts of COVID-19 incident hospital admissions in the United States. THieF is an innovative forecasting technique that aggregates time-series data into …

Prevalence Of Sars-Cov-2 Antibodies In Liberty University Student Population, Emily Bonus

Senior Honors Theses

In 2020, the virus SARS-CoV-2 gained attention as it spread around the world. Its antibodies are poorly understood, and little research focuses on those with few COVID-19 complications yet large numbers of close contacts: university students. This longitudinal study recorded SARS-CoV-2 antibody presence in 107 undergraduate Liberty University students twice during early 2021. After extensive data cleaning and the application of various statistical tests and ANOVAs, the data seems to show that in the case of COVID-19 infections, SARS-CoV-2 IgM antibodies are immediately produced, and then IgG antibodies follow later. However, the COVID-19 vaccine causes the production of both IgM …

Is Obesity Socially Contagious?, Ciani Jean Sparks

Statistics

The main objective of this paper is to analyze three different articles that discuss whether obesity could be socially contagious. According to the World Health Organization in 2013, obesity is the fifth leading risk for deaths around the world. This disease has dramatically increased in the last decade, which has led scientists to believe there are other factors contributing to the epidemic besides genetics. The first article I analyzed, written by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, provided a logistic regression model to estimate the odds of a person becoming obese. The model included the explanatory variables: age, sex, education, smoking …

Interactions Between Serotypes Of Dengue Highlight Epidemiological Impact Of Cross-Immunity, Nicholas Reich, Sourya Shrestha, Aaron King, Pejman Rohani, Justin Lessler, Siripen Kalayanarooj, In-Kyu Yoon, Robert Gibbons, Donald Burke, Derek Cummings

Nicholas G Reich

Dengue, a mosquito-borne virus of humans, infects over 50 million people annually. Infection with any of the four dengue serotypes induces protective immunity to that serotype, but does not confer long-term protection against infection by other serotypes. The immunological interactions between sero- types are of central importance in understanding epidemiological dynamics and anticipating the impact of dengue vaccines. We analysed a 38-year time series with 12 197 serotyped dengue infections from a hospital in Bangkok, Thailand. Using novel mechanistic models to represent different hypothesized immune interactions between serotypes, we found strong evidence that infec- tion with dengue provides substantial short-term …