Does climate help modeling COVID-19 risk and to what extent?

the increase of the values of the dependent variable, going from 35.1% when daily cases are < 100 down to 17.5% with daily cases >500. To obtain a more complete estimate of model accuracy we tested the performance of the optimized GBRT model for each distinct location. We selected areas from different climatic zones that presented high numbers of daily cases during one or several contagion waves throughout the year. The results of this evaluation reveal error rates ranging from 12.9% to 26.8%, as shown in Fig 3. Once the GBRT model is trained, the relative ranking of model parameters is obtained through the SHAP method. Tree SHAP is an algorithm that computes SHAP values for Deci- sion Trees models such as GBRT. SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanation) [77, 78] uses a game theoretic approach to explain the prediction for each instance as a sum of contributions from its individual feature values. This type of analysis does not identify causal correlation, but it is still a useful metric to capture relative feature importance. Econometric analysis The econometric analysis of the association between confirmed COVID-19 infections and cli- matic factors is carried out using the multivariate equation in (1) which implements a panel data approach based on a fixed-effects model [79]. In this equation, the dependent variable ln_daily_casesi,t expresses the number of daily cases of COVID-19 cases on a logarithmic scale for location i and time index t. We use the log-transformed version of the dependent variable

on the assumption that by doing so the variable becomes log-normal conditional on all the covariates and thus allows us to limit the heteroscedasticity of the estimated residuals. β0 is the Fig 2. Boxplot of the SMAPE distribution as a function of intervals of number of COVID-19 daily cases. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0273078.g002 PLOS ONE Does climate help modeling COVID-19 risk and to what extent? PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0273078 September 7, 2022 10 / 27