Quinn Forzley

Title: Exploring Spatio-Temporal Heterogeneity and Correlation in COVID-19 Associated Follow-Up Visits and Events
Date: Wednesday, August 14th, 2024
Time: 2:00pm
Location: LIB 7200
Supervised by: Dr. X. Joan Hu & Dr. Rhonda Rosychuk

Abstract: Over the last several years, the world has been transformed by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Scientists, physicians and researchers have had to make decisions in a constantly changing environment. Clinical decision rules are developed to aid in making these decisions, however standard approaches to derive these rules do not sufficiently address the challenges that arose for data analysis during this pandemic. Specifically, problems may arise from the use of multisite emergency department data, as sites may have different standards of practice and populations. This project investigates the heterogeneity of data collected across Canada during the pandemic and uses multilevel regression models to capture the variation more efficiently than the standard approach. These results are compared to a model which ignores any clustering that is present in the data.