Generalized Additive Models and SIR definition of reproductive number

[gdmarmerola]

Hey guys!

Firstly, thank you very much for sharing your work and raising awareness on Rt. We already forked the code and started or own repository and website for applying Bettencourt & Ribeiro's model to brazilian states: code / website

I was thinking about some issues that you guys and other people raised, such as:

• Choice of smoothness function
• Calibrating sigma
• Low uncertainty

And tried to model Rt with a completely different methodology, using the SIR model definition of the reproductive number:

Rt = (case growth rate) / (recovery rate)

Modeling the case growth rate with a vanilla ML model, such as Generalized Additive Models, and using recovery rate as 1 / (14 days)

Code and deep dive in this notebook

Results are similar, but I'm not entirely convinced that its a good approach. Would love to hear your feedback on this :)

Keep up the awesome work! Thank you very much!