Spatial-temporal generalized additive model for modeling COVID-19 mortality risk in Toronto, Canada

This article presents a spatial–temporal generalized additive model for modeling geo-referenced COVID-19 mortality data in Toronto, Canada. A range of factors and spatial–temporal terms are incorporated into the model. The non-linear and interactive effects of the neighborhood-level factors, i.e., population density and average of income, are modeled as a two-dimensional spline smoother. The change of spatial pattern over time is modeled as a three-dimensional tensor product smoother. By fitting this model, the space–time effect can uncover the underlying spatial–temporal pattern that is not explained by the covariates. The performance of the modeling method based on the individual data is also compared to the modeling methods based on the aggregated data in terms of in-sample and out-of-sample predictive checking. The results suggest that the individual-level based analysis provided a better overall model fit and higher predictive accuracy for detecting epidemic peaks in this application as compared to the analysis based on the aggregated data.