Assessing Global Covid-19 Cases Data through Compositional Data Analysis (CoDa)

Author(s): Luis PV Braga

Background: Covid-19 cases data pose an enormous challenge to any analysis. The evaluation of such a global pandemic requires matching reports that follow different procedures and even overcoming some countries' censorship that restricts publications.

Methods: This work proposes a methodology that could assist future studies. Compositional Data Analysis (CoDa) is proposed as the proper approach as Covid-19 cases data is compositional in nature. Under this methodology, for each country three attributes were selected: cumulative number of deaths (D); cumulative number of recovered patients(R); present number of patients (A).

Results: After the operation called closure, with c=1, a ternary diagram and Log-Ratio plots, as well as, compositional statistics are presented. Cluster analysis is then applied, splitting the countries into discrete groups.

Conclusions: This methodology can also be applied to other data sets such as countries, cities, provinces or districts in order to help authorities and governmental agencies to improve their actions to fight against a pandemic