1. Spatial and temporal regularization to estimate COVID-19 reproduction number R(t): Promoting piecewise smoothness via convex optimization.
- Author
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Abry, Patrice, Pustelnik, Nelly, Roux, Stéphane, Jensen, Pablo, Flandrin, Patrick, Gribonval, Rémi, Lucas, Charles-Gérard, Guichard, Éric, Borgnat, Pierre, and Garnier, Nicolas
- Subjects
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COVID-19 , *INVERSE problems , *TIME series analysis , *TIKHONOV regularization , *STATISTICAL smoothing , *COEVOLUTION - Abstract
Among the different indicators that quantify the spread of an epidemic such as the on-going COVID-19, stands first the reproduction number which measures how many people can be contaminated by an infected person. In order to permit the monitoring of the evolution of this number, a new estimation procedure is proposed here, assuming a well-accepted model for current incidence data, based on past observations. The novelty of the proposed approach is twofold: 1) the estimation of the reproduction number is achieved by convex optimization within a proximal-based inverse problem formulation, with constraints aimed at promoting piecewise smoothness; 2) the approach is developed in a multivariate setting, allowing for the simultaneous handling of multiple time series attached to different geographical regions, together with a spatial (graph-based) regularization of their evolutions in time. The effectiveness of the approach is first supported by simulations, and two main applications to real COVID-19 data are then discussed. The first one refers to the comparative evolution of the reproduction number for a number of countries, while the second one focuses on French departments and their joint analysis, leading to dynamic maps revealing the temporal co-evolution of their reproduction numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2020
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