Roselinde Kessels, Assistant Professor, University of Antwerp and Maastricht University
Chris Gotwalt, JMP Director of Statistical Research and Development, JMP
Guido Erreygers, Professor of Economics, University of Antwerp
In 1919 and 1921, Raymond Pearl published four empirical studies on the Spanish flu epidemic. He explored the factors that might explain the epidemic's explosiveness and destructiveness in America's largest cities. Using partial correlation coefficients, he tried to isolate the net effects of the possible explanatory factors, such as general demographics of the cities and death rates for various diseases, on the variables measuring the severity of the epidemic. In this presentation, we revisit Pearl's data and apply variable selection with a pseudo-variable in JMP®'s Generalized Regression platform instead of Pearl's correlation analysis. We use Poisson forward selection on the variables in the platform with AICc validation. We find that our results largely correspond with Pearl's conclusions but contain some additional nuances that are substantive. This paper contributes to the literature showing that Poisson regression proves useful for historical epidemiology. JMP's Generalized Regression platform offers researchers much flexibility in choosing the most appropriate model.
