Roselinde Kessels, Assistant Professor, University of Antwerp and Maastricht University
Chris Gotwalt, JMP Chief Data Scientist, JMP
Guido Erreygers, Full professor of economics, University of Antwerp
In 1919 and 1921, Raymond Pearl published four empirical studies on the Spanish flu epidemic in which he explored the factors that might explain the explosiveness and the destructiveness of the epidemic in America's largest cities. Using partial correlation coefficients, he tried to isolate the net effects of the possible explanatory factors, such as general demographic characteristics of the cities and death rates for various diseases, on the variables measuring the severity of the epidemic. In this talk, we revisit Pearl's data and apply variable selection with a pseudo variable in JMP's generalized linear modeling (GLM) platform instead of Pearl's correlation analysis. We find that our results largely correspond with Pearl's conclusions, but contain some additional nuances that are substantive. Our paper contributes to the literature showing that GLM proves useful for historical epidemiology. JMP's GLM platform offers much flexibility to choose the most appropriate model.
