Revisiting Pearl's influenza studies by bootstrapping for forward variable selection with a null factor.

ABSTRACT: In 1919 and 1921 Raymond Pearl published four empirical studies on the Spanish Flu epidemic in which he explored the factors that might explain the explosiveness and destructiveness of the epidemic in America's largest cities. Using partial correlation coefficients he tried to isolate the net effects of the possible explanatory factors, such as general demographic characteristics of the cities and death rates for various diseases, on the variables measuring the severity of the epidemic. Instead of Pearl's correlation analysis, we apply a bootstrap simulation to forward variable selection with a null factor for generalized linear regression with AICc validation. The null factor or pseudo-variable is a random variable that is independent of the response. The number of times it is included in

SUBMITTER: Kessels R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11856291 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature