Does influenza drive absolute humidity?
Year: 2017
Type: letter
Abstract: Multiple lines of evidence suggest that absolute humidity and school terms affect the timing of influenza epidemics, although the contributions of these and other factors are still unresolved (1⇓⇓⇓–5). In PNAS, Deyle et al. (6) applied convergent cross-mapping (CCM) to measure the impact of environmental variables on influenza activity. The authors concluded that absolute humidity and temperature are not merely correlated with influenza activity but in fact directly or indirectly cause epidemics.
The mathematical basis of CCM involves strict assumptions that may be violated in nature (7). Process noise, secular changes in parameters, and other transient dynamics can lead to situations where the underlying attractor is undersampled, causing errors in reconstruction and inference (8). There are not …
[↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: cobey{at}uchicago.edu.
[1]: #xref-corresp-1-1
Authors: Edward B. Baskerville, Sarah Cobey
Institution: University of Chicago
Language: English
Subfield: Epidemiology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2598393276