Seasonal mortality rates
The weekly mortality data recently published by the Human Mortality Database can be used to explore seasonality in mortality rates. Mortality rates are known to be seasonal due to temperatures and other weather-related effects (Healy 2003).
Excess deaths for 2020
The reported COVID19 deaths in each country are often undercounts due to different reporting practices, or people dying of COVID19 related causes without ever being tested. One way to explore the true mortality effect of the pandemic is to look at “excess deaths” — the difference between death rates this year and the same time in previous years. The Financial Times (and other media outlets) have been collecting data from many countries to try to measure this effect.Why log ratios are useful for tracking COVID-19
There have been some great data visualizations produced of COVID-19 case and deaths data, the best known of which is the graph from John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times. To my knowledge, it was first used by Matt Cowgill from the Grattan Institute, and has been widely copied. This is a great visualization and has helped introduce log-scale graphics to a wide audience. Reproducing the Financial Times cumulative confirmed cases graph To produce something like it, we can use the tidycovid19 package from Joachim Gassen:Recent publications
- Yanfei Kang, Rob J Hyndman, Feng Li (2020) GRATIS: GeneRAting TIme Series with diverse and controllable characteristics. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining, to appear. Abstract DOI pdf
- Priyanga Dilini Talagala, Rob J Hyndman, Kate Smith-Miles, Sevvandi Kandanaarachchi and Mario A Muñoz (2020) Anomaly detection in streaming nonstationary temporal data. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 20(1), 13-27. Abstract DOI pdf
- Shanika L Wickramasuriya, Berwin A Turlach, Rob J Hyndman (2020) Optimal non-negative forecast reconciliation. Statistics & Computing, to appear. Abstract DOI pdf
- Han Li, Rob J Hyndman (2020) Assessing Longevity Inequality in the US: What Can Be Said About the Future?. Abstract pdf
- Souhaib Ben Taieb, James W Taylor, Rob J Hyndman (2020) Hierarchical Probabilistic Forecasting of Electricity Demand with Smart Meter Data. J American Statistical Association, to appear. Abstract DOI pdf
Recent and upcoming seminars
- Developing good research habits. (31 March 2020) More info...
- How Rmarkdown changed my life. (30 January 2020) More info...
- Tidy time series & forecasting in R. (27 January 2020) More info...
- The journal game. (29 October 2019) More info...
- Forecasts are always wrong (but we need them anyway). (9 October 2019) More info...