Exploring COVID-19 in mainland China during the lockdown of Wuhan via functional data analysis

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the time series data of the case and death counts of COVID-19 that broke out in China in December, 2019. The study period is during the lockdown of Wuhan. We exploit functional data analysis methods to analyze the collected time series data. The analysis is divided into three parts. First, the functional principal component analysis is conducted to investigate the modes of variation. Second, we carry out the functional canonical correlation analysis to explore the relationship between confirmed and death cases. Finally, we utilize a clustering method based on the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to run the cluster analysis on the counts of confirmed cases, where the number of clusters is determined via a cross-validation approach. Besides, we compare the clustering results with some migration data available to the public.