## Two trees and a sinking ship

#### How early stopping with LightGBM helped me predict who survived the Titanic disaster with >80% accuracy.

Predicting who survived the Titanic is a well-known machine learning competition on Kaggle.

The problem provides data for each of the passengers on the Titanic, their Age, sex, the class they travelled in, the port they embarked from, the fare they paid for their ticket, the number of family members they had travelling with them etc and requires us to build a model to predict whether the passenger survived.

I started out with it as a beginner to competing in Kaggle, and I used a tree based, ensemble model in my solution as they are well known to give good results in machine learning competitions. In particular, gradient boosted machines like xgboost and lightgbm work very well with tabular data.

In this post, I am not delving into exploratory data analysis for the problem because it has been done really well by a lot of datascientists, I’ll link to a few of them here. Instead I will talk about how I started off by heavily overfitting my model and how using early stopping with LightGBM helped me get a good fit and score within the top 8% of submissions. There were a couple of places where I felt I could squeeze out a little more accuracy, but at some point we need to move on and learn more.

What is LightGBM ?

LightGBM is an ensemble model of trees (weak learners) which uses gradient boosting to form predictions. You can learn more about gradient boosted machines, including xgboost on Statquest Josh Starmer’s amazing youtube channel. Here’s the link to the original LightGBM paper.

To summarize, gradient boosting uses a series of trees. First, a base learner makes a single prediction for the entire dataset, and then each tree that comes after builds on the residuals (errors) of the previous tree. A constant learning rate is used to proportionately add up the predictions from each of the trees.

Gradient boosting is an excellent technique that has reaped great results in the few years since its inception. However, it is prone to over fitting. LightGBM provides an array of techniques to prevent overfitting. Eg: restricting the depth of each tree, the number of leaves in the tree, the number of trees in the model, the number of bins over which efficient splits are searched for etc.

When I built my model, I realized that the Titanic dataset was inherently noisy, there is no way the data could give a perfect prediction of who survived the disaster, luck invariably played a factor. I knew that it was likely my model would fit noise. Hence I used many of the hyperparameters to perform a gridsearch within cross-validation folds. However, I wasn’t reaching a satisfactory accuracy. That is when I realized, that I was building at least 50 trees in each of my models. The default for the number of trees parameter was 100 and my grid was searching among 50, 100, 150 trees. It turns out I needed way fewer trees! I wouldn’t have realized this from my grid search alone. This is where early stopping comes into play.

Early stopping essentially tunes the number of trees/number of iterations parameter for you. The crux of the technique is, LightGBM after asking for a validation dataset, offers to stop building more trees once the metric of interest (accuracy in this case) stops showing an improvement after a specified number of iterations. The icing on the cake is, early stopping also returns the best iteration (number of trees for which the validation set gave the best metric score) even if this iteration happened earlier than the number of iterations required to trigger early stopping. So, if I had set early stopping to 100 (like I did) LightGBM would perform 100 iterations for sure before invoking early stopping, that is stopping the process when improvements fail to occur. However, if the best iteration was at 20 trees. LightGBM still stores this result and lets me know!

Through this, I realized that I was heavily overfitting my model and with a large enough learning rate, I needed only two or three trees! My dataset was indeed much smaller (892 rows) than what LightGBM was built for. Once I severely cut down the number of trees, I got a greater than 80% accuracy in the contest and was among the top ~8% submissions.

My code is available here on github.

You can see in the figure below, how the training set accuracy keeps increasing with the number of trees, but the cross validation accuracy drops steeply after the first few trees. This is classic overfitting, a machine learning algorithm fitting to noise and thus giving poor generalization.

I hope you can learn from my experience.

The same graph as above with an untruncated axis, That little decline you see in the crossvalidation dataset, takes you several thousand points below on the leaderboard 😀

— author, Gowri Thampi

## Bayesian Skepticism: Why denialism isn’t skepticism.

I often hear of denialism dressed up as skepticism, such as “I’m a climate change skeptic“’ or of late “I’m a COVID19 skeptic“’, but no, that’s not skepticism, that’s denialism, there’s no better way to put it. I enjoy statistics, I try to live as far as possible, by evidence-based reasoning, but I’m human, I’m prone to pet theories and preconceived notions like anyone else. I found great solace in Bayes’ theorem in giving me science and philosophy to balance out my human failings with my desire for facts and reason. Today I want to share this with you.

Frequentist statistics looks at a bunch of observations and make an inference about them. The null hypotheses usually go with the status quo. We humans though have preconceived notions. I’m convinced that my dog is giving me the cold shoulder because I petted another one first, I have these feelings without knowing anything about the research into animal behavior. Are dogs really capable of such thought? If scientists provide me with evidence to the contrary, should I not change my mind, despite my strong internal feelings? Bayes’ theorem is more than a formula in a textbook, the very idea of rationality and changing one’s mind based on the evidence presented, is baked into it. The formula at its simplest derives very quickly from well-known laws of conditional probability.

That is the formula, where A and B are two events. P(A) and P(B) are the probabilities of occurrence of events A and B respectively. P(A|B) is the probability of event A occurring given event B occurred and P(B|A) is the probability of event B occurring given event A occurred. The beauty of Bayes’ theorem is that you can think of the formula this way.

The prior represents your belief that A will occur (or that A is true) before being presented the evidence, the event B. P(B|A) is the likelihood of the evidence occurring if A is true, and P(B) is the overall probability of the evidence occurring. P(A|B) is how you revise your estimate that A is true, given the new evidence. Not obvious? let’s talk of a little example.

Your friend has a coin, he claims it is a loaded coin, and using it will give you an edge if you call heads. He says this coin will turn up heads, 75 percent of the time. You don’t really believe your friend; he says all sorts of stuff. So, you have a preconceived notion that this coin is probably fair.  You assign a 90% probability to the coin being fair. Fair enough!

Now your friend knows that you tend to get convinced by the evidence. He asks you to toss the coin 20 times and make up your own mind. You agree, toss it 20 times and now it turns up heads 14 out of 20 times.  Now what? Do you believe your friend that the coin is loaded? Let’s keep the model simple and avoid integrating over a continuous range of possibilities by assuming that the coin is either totally fair or loaded to turn up heads 75 percent of the time.

Now let Fair be the event that the coin is fair and Fourteen is the event that you observe 14 heads in 20 tosses. You initially thought that P(Fair) = 0.9 and P(Loaded) = 1 – P(Fair) = 0.1  and   but you know Bayes’ theorem, you know that

So, the probability that the coin is fair has to be revised after observing Fourteen.  Our prior probability gets multiplied by a ratio. The numerator of the ratio is P(Fourteen|Fair), that is the probability you will observe fourteen heads out of twenty given a fair coin. Thankfully this is easy to compute given it follows the binomial distribution. (You can read about it here, but it isn’t necessary to understand it for the purpose of this discussion)

$P(Fourteen|Fair) = .037$

But what is P(Fourteen)? that is the total probability of getting 14 heads out of twenty tosses. Well, there are two ways this could have happened, either the coin was fair and we observed fourteen heads out of twenty tosses, or the coin was loaded and we observed 14 heads out of twenty tosses. In both cases it is possible to observe 14 heads! Just with different probabilities.

So,

$P(Fourteen) = P(Fourteen|Fair) *P(Fair) + P(Fourteen|Loaded)*P(Loaded)$

This is the law of total probability. Again, from the binomial probability distribution, P(Fourteen|Loaded) = 16.9% and from the law of total probability,

P(Fourteen) = 0.037 * 0.9 + .169 * 0.1 = 0.05

Therefore, you need to adjust your probability that the coin is fair!

P(Fair|Fourteen) = 0.9*0.037/0.05 = 0.667

And voila, from being 90% sure, you are now only 66.7% sure that the coin is Fair! Just after a simple experiment, you have to change your preconceived notions.

Well what if you hadn’t observed 14 heads? What if you had observed 13 or 15? Well, with a few short lines of Python, you can graph how the evidence changes your Posterior probability, despite the Prior probability (preconceived notion) of the coin being fair.

from scipy.stats import binom
import numpy as np

p_fair = 0.9
outcomes = list(range(0,21))

# Get the probability of 0 - 20 heads in a trial given
# the coin is fair
p_outcomes_given_fair = binom.pmf(outcomes,20,0.5)

# Get the probability of 0 - 20 heads in a trial given
# the coin is loaded #to give heads 75% of the time.
p_outcomes = p_outcomes_given_fair * p_fair + p_outcomes_given_loaded*p_loaded
p_fair_given_outcomes = p_fair * (p_outcomes_given_fair) / p_outcomes

#Draws the plots
ax = sns.lineplot(x = outcomes, y = p_fair_given_outcomes)ax.
set_ylabel('Probability of coin being Fair')
ax.set_xlabel('Number of Heads in twenty tosses')
ax.set_title('Loaded at 75% heads or Fair?')

And there you see how evidence impacts your preconceived notions. This is what I love about Bayes’ theorem.

1. You are allowed to have preconceived notions; skepticism is in fact good!
2. You change your mind when presented with evidence.
3. How much the evidence changes your mind, depends on the likelihood of the evidence occurring given what you think is true.
4. Not changing one’s mind despite the evidence isn’t skepticism, don’t call it that, it is denialism.

So, if you believe X is true and Y happens which is very unlikely to happen if X is true but quite likely to happen if X is false, you reset your mental probability of X being true! Plus, it is iterative, you can keep changing your mind as new evidence is presented.

Let’s take the same approach to climate change or COVID19, I understand it is hard to believe outright that the climate is changing due to our actions or that there is a killer pandemic out there, our brains want to believe differently, that things are okay, but let us change those beliefs when presented with evidence. If you’d hang on here for a little while more, we’ll apply this theorem to climate science, and think a little. We know that 97% of climate scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is happening.

Let NinetySeven be the event that 97% of climate scientists agree on anthropogenic climate change, and ClimateChange be the event that anthropogenic climate change is occurring.  Then using our previous formulae,

Of course, we can only wonder about the probabilities here, but even if you are initially skeptical about climate change, assigning it a 20% probability of happening.

What do you think the probability is that ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists would agree that it is happening, given it is actually happening. Let’s say you doubt the scientists’ ability to accurately measure climate change and hence assign only an 80% probability, that they would agree it is happening, given it is happening.

More interestingly, what do you think the probability is that ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists agree on climate change happening, when in fact it is not! That seems absurd! But even if you think that would happen 10% of the time. (I find that unlikely, but I’ll be generous). You now have to revise your prior belief to

P(ClimateChange|NinetySeven) = 0.2 * (0.8)/(0.8*0.2 + 0.1*0.8)
= 0.67!

So now you at least have to be on the fence about climate change, and then you can read up more and revise your belief as you encounter more evidence.

In real life, we’ll only have guesstimates for a lot of these probabilities, but think about this, every time you hear a conspiracy theory they try to claim that there is a large probability that the evidence is manipulated, that massive amounts of evidence exists despite the hypothesis being false, and this is a result of some large scale coordinated effort. Think about the probability that this could be true, for eg: That 97% percent of the world’s scientists were coerced into claiming a falsehood is true, if there isn’t a good explanation (with evidence) for how this could be, then the skepticism is just denialism.

I’ll leave this discussion here, there can be more said about what evidence is real or good. Should I believe everything I see, but that is another topic.

Do check out this article for a beautiful Bayesian argument for anthropogenic climate change.

— author, Gowri Thampi

http://bayestheorem.weebly.com/climate-change.html

# For those who acquire COVID-19 and recover, how long does the illness last ?¶

## (Time to event analysis of COVID-19 recovery data from India.)¶

Disclaimer : This is an unofficial analysis of sparsely populated data, by a data science enthusiast. I am not a health care professional and the answers obtained here should not be considered official much less definitive. The objective is to glean what insights we can from the data exposed to us, and generate discussion on ways to tackle such questions.

(Uses Patient level COVID-19 data from India,
Source of Data: https://api.covid19india.org/csv/)

#### 9. References ¶

In [1]:
# This Python 3 environment comes with many helpful analytics libraries installed
# It is defined by the kaggle/python Docker image: https://github.com/kaggle/docker-python
# For example, here's several helpful packages to load
import warnings
import pprint
from IPython.display import HTML
from scipy.stats import ttest_ind
warnings.filterwarnings('ignore')
!pip -q install lifelines
import numpy as np # linear algebra
import pandas as pd # data processing, CSV file I/O (e.g. pd.read_csv)

# Input data files are available in the read-only "../input/" directory
# For example, running this (by clicking run or pressing Shift+Enter) will list all files under the input directory

# You can write up to 5GB to the current directory (/kaggle/working/) that gets preserved as output when you create a version using "Save & Run All"
# You can also write temporary files to /kaggle/temp/, but they won't be saved outside of the current session
;

WARNING: pip is being invoked by an old script wrapper. This will fail in a future version of pip.
Please see https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/5599 for advice on fixing the underlying issue.
To avoid this problem you can invoke Python with '-m pip' instead of running pip directly.

Out[1]:
''

## 1. Questions we want to answer:¶

The main questions we wish to delve into are as follows:

• Given that a person falls ill with COVID-19 and then makes a recovery, how long does the illness last?
• What factors do the time to recovery depend on? The analysis considers Sex and Age as factors that could potentially impact recovery times.

## 2. About the Data¶

Patient level COVID-19 data from India was sourced from https://api.covid19india.org/csv/. By their own description the website is a volunteer-driven, crowdsourced database for COVID-19 stats and patient tracing in India. The source for each patient's information is given as links to newspaper and magazine articles.

The data has a column each, for the date the case was announced (Date Announced), the current status of the case (Current Status among: deceased, hospitalized, recovered) and the date the status changed to the current status (Status Change Date).

The difference between the Status Change Date and the Date Announced was used as the time to recovery in this model. Though the Date Announced wouldn't be the date the patient got ill, it would be quite close to the date serious symptoms were reported.

Data collection could not be perfect in such a crowd sourced venture during a pandemic. Often the Status Change Date, was the same as the Date Announced. This is probably due to lack of information about when the case status changed. Attributes like gender and age are quite sparsely populated. The number of recoveries recorded were just 181 out of 17,306 observations. In most cases the current status was listed as hospitalized, probably as the recovery of the case wasn't tracked. I did not include the hospitalized cases as censored observations in my analysis as is often done in Time To Event modelling because they were the overwhelming majority and their timelines weren't tracked. Hence including them would reduce the insights we could glean from the few cases where timelines and other attributes like gender and age were properly logged.

The website itself states that due to the inability to track the changes in each case, they are deprecating the Current Status field. However, the data used in this analysis was of earlier cases (Those announced before April 19th 2020) and hence this information is sometimes available and can be used.

Despite the shortcomings, we do get enough data to get information that answers some of our questions and points us in the direction of further research. We also develop a methodology for analysis that can be done if better anonymized data is available from hospitals.

For further questions about the data and my methodology please email me at [email protected]

## 3. Why focus on recovery?¶

• Several models exist which try to predict the fatality rate and the factors affecting it.
• Being ill for a long period of time has negative consequences too, eg: losses in productivity (I only know too well as a survivor of severe Repetitive Stress Injury)
In [2]:
#read the table from my kaggle input
covid = pd.read_table('raw_data.csv', sep = ','  , usecols = list(range(0,20)))

#clean up some errors found in < .1% of this column, due to data import issues
covid = covid.loc[~covid['Status Change Date'].isin(['Imported', 'Local'])]
covid['Date Announced'] = pd.to_datetime(covid['Date Announced'],infer_datetime_format=True, errors = 'ignore',dayfirst = True)
covid['Status Change Date'] = pd.to_datetime(covid['Status Change Date'],infer_datetime_format=True, errors = 'ignore',dayfirst = True)

#check data types
#print(covid.dtypes)

In [3]:
#Filter out those who recovered from Covid19 - most cases are still hospitalized

covid_recovered = covid[covid['Current Status']== 'Recovered']

#calculate time to recovery in days
covid_recovered['time_to_recovery'] = (covid_recovered['Status Change Date'] - covid_recovered['Date Announced']).dt.days
covid_recovered = covid_recovered[covid_recovered['time_to_recovery']!=0]
#check the data

#pd.set_option('display.max_rows', None)
#print(covid_recovered.shape)
#print(covid_recovered['time_to_recovery'].value_counts())


## 4. Overall recovery time¶

Boxplots show the median (line through the box), minimum, maximum( lower and upper whiskers) and the first and third quartile (within the rectangle) of a value. Value plotted here is the time to recovery, of the 181 patients who recovered and we have Time to Recovery information about.

In [4]:
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from matplotlib import ticker as mtick
import seaborn as sns
%matplotlib inline
figsize = (5,8)
fig = plt.figure(figsize = figsize)
ax = sns.boxplot(y = 'time_to_recovery' , data = covid_recovered)
ax.set( ylabel = 'Time to recovery', title = 'Time to recovery by sex of patient.')

med_time_to_recovery =  covid_recovered['time_to_recovery'].median()
print("Median time to recovery is{0: .0f} days".format(med_time_to_recovery))

plt.show()

Median time to recovery is 14 days


### What percentage of patients remain sick, a given number of days after diagnosis?¶

To visualize this, we draw what are known as Kaplan-Meier curves. In these curves, derived from our data, the Y axis shows what percentage of the total population who finally recovered, are still sick, and the X axis shows the number of days after diagnosis. For example, 10 days after diagnosis, roughly 60% of the people who finally recovered are still sick. The steeper the slope of this curve, the faster the recovery time. Since everyone in our population finally recovered, we see that by the longest recovery time we have in our data (25 days) nobody is still sick.

In [5]:
from lifelines import KaplanMeierFitter
figsize = (8,8)

kmf_data = covid_recovered['time_to_recovery'].value_counts()
time_to_recovery = covid_recovered['time_to_recovery']
event_occured = np.empty(len(time_to_recovery))
event_occured.fill(1)
#print(kmf_data)

## create a kmf object
kmf = KaplanMeierFitter()
fig = plt.figure(figsize = figsize)
ax = fig.gca()
ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(mtick.PercentFormatter(1.0))
ax.set(xlabel = 'Days since diagnosis ' , ylabel = 'Percentage still sick', title = 'Population recovery curve (Kaplan Meier)')
kmf.fit(time_to_recovery, event_occured, label = 'Percentage sick')
kmf.plot(ax = ax)

Out[5]:
<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot at 0x7f10226fb690>

## 5. Recovery rates by Sex¶

For this part of the analysis we further filter out the data, leaving only those who also have the sex column filled out. We have 92 patients, 64 male and 28 female. The median time to recovery is greater for females(16 days) than males(14 days), that does run contrary to the fact that women have lower fatality rates from COVID-19 than men. The dataset is small, and the sexes are not equally represented in it, also there may be confounding due to a second variable (like age) disproportionately distributed in the two sexes, but to me this indicates a need for further research.

A t-test run on the mean recovery times for the two sexes resulted in a p-value of 0.11, this indicates that we only have an eighty nine percent confidence that the mean recovery times for the two groups are different, not high enough to be conclusive at all, but it does merit investigation with a larger dataset when available.

In [6]:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from tabulate import tabulate
sns.set(style="whitegrid")

covid_gender = covid_recovered[pd.notnull(covid_recovered['Gender'])]
covid_gender.loc[covid_gender['Gender']=='F','Gender'] = 'Female'
covid_gender.loc[covid_gender['Gender']=='M','Gender'] = 'Male'
#print(covid_recovered.shape)
#print(covid_gender.shape)
#print(covid_gender[covid_gender['time_to_recovery']!=0].shape)

print(tabulate(pd.DataFrame(covid_gender['Gender'].value_counts())))

med_time_to_recovery_male =  covid_gender.loc[covid_gender['Gender']=='Male','time_to_recovery'].median()
print("Median time to recovery for males is{0: .0f} days.".format(med_time_to_recovery_male))

med_time_to_recovery_female =  covid_gender.loc[covid_gender['Gender']=='Female','time_to_recovery'].median()
print("Median time to recovery for females is{0: .0f} days.".format(med_time_to_recovery_female))

fig = plt.figure(figsize = figsize)
ax = sns.boxplot(x = 'Gender' , y = 'time_to_recovery' , data = covid_gender[covid_gender['time_to_recovery']!=0])
ax.set(xlabel = 'Sex' , ylabel = 'Time to recovery', title = 'Time to recovery by sex of patient.')
plt.close(2)
plt.close(3)
#plt.table(loc = 'bottom', cellText = cell_text)
plt.show()
ttest,pval = ttest_ind(covid_gender.loc[covid_gender['Gender']=='Female','time_to_recovery'],covid_gender.loc[covid_gender['Gender']=='Male','time_to_recovery'])
print("p-value {0: .2f}".format(pval))

------  --
Male    64
Female  28
------  --
Median time to recovery for males is 14 days.
Median time to recovery for females is 16 days.

p-value  0.11


How many people remain sick a given number of days after diagnosis ?

We again draw Kaplan-Meier curves for each sex, superimposed on the same axes. The steeper slope for males would indicate that males recover faster. The confidence intervals for each curve are shown by the shaded region. Overlapping confidence intervals indicate our lack of confidence that the actual recovery times for the populations of males and females differ from each other, given the data we have.

In [7]:
fig = plt.figure(figsize = figsize)
for gender, grouped_gender in covid_gender.groupby('Gender'):
time_to_recovery = grouped_gender['time_to_recovery']
event_occured = np.empty(len(time_to_recovery))
event_occured.fill(1)
kmf.fit(time_to_recovery, event_occured, label = 'Percentage sick ' + gender)
ax = fig.gca()
ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(mtick.PercentFormatter(1.0))
ax.set(xlabel = 'Days since diagnosis' , ylabel = 'Percentage still sick', title = 'Recovery curves by gender (Kaplan Meier)')
kmf.plot()

#print(covid_recovered['Age Bracket'].value_counts())


## 6. Recovery rates by Age¶

For this part of the analysis we filter out the data, leaving only those who also have the age column filled out. We bucket the age groups into those under and over 50. Due to the sparsity of data, creating more buckets would lead to very few observations in each.

We have 94 patients, 63 under 50 years of and 31 over 50 years of age. The median time to recovery is much greater for those over 50(21 days) than those under 50 (14 days), this is more in line with what we know about the virus, and the increased fatality rate with age.

A t-test run on the mean recovery times for the two age groups, resulted in a p-value really close to zero.

In [8]:
covid_recovered['Age Bracketf'] = covid_recovered['Age Bracket'].astype(float)
covid_recovered.loc[covid_recovered['Age Bracketf'] < 50 , 'Age Bucket' ] = 'under 50'
#covid_recovered.loc[(covid_recovered['Age Bracketf'] >=  40) & (covid_recovered['Age Bracketf'] < 65), 'Age Bucket' ] = 'between 40 and 65'
covid_recovered.loc[ covid_recovered['Age Bracketf'] >= 50, 'Age Bucket' ] = 'over 50'
covid_age = covid_recovered[pd.notnull(covid_recovered['Age Bracketf'])]

print(tabulate(pd.DataFrame(covid_age['Age Bucket'].value_counts())))

#print(tabulate(pd.DataFrame(covid_age.loc[covid_age['Age Bucket']=='over 50','time_to_recovery'].value_counts())))
#print(tabulate(pd.DataFrame(covid_age.loc[covid_age['Age Bucket']=='under 50','time_to_recovery'].value_counts())))

med_time_to_recovery_under50 =  covid_age.loc[covid_age['Age Bucket']=='under 50','time_to_recovery'].median()
print("Median time to recovery for the under 50 age group is{0: .0f} days.".format(med_time_to_recovery_under50))

med_time_to_recovery_over50 =  covid_age.loc[covid_age['Age Bucket']=='over 50','time_to_recovery'].median()
print("Median time to recovery for the over 50 age group is{0: .0f} days.".format(med_time_to_recovery_over50))
figsize = (8,10)

fig = plt.figure(figsize = figsize)
ax = sns.boxplot(x = 'Age Bucket' , y = 'time_to_recovery' , data = covid_age[covid_age['time_to_recovery']!=0])
ax.set(xlabel = 'Age' , ylabel = 'Time to recovery', title = 'Time to recovery by age of patient.')
plt.close(2)
plt.close(3)
#plt.table(loc = 'bottom', cellText = cell_text)
plt.show()
ttest,pval = ttest_ind(covid_age.loc[covid_age['Age Bucket']=='under 50','time_to_recovery'],covid_age.loc[covid_age['Age Bucket']=='over 50','time_to_recovery'])
print("p-value {0: .3f}".format(pval))

--------  --
under 50  63
over 50   31
--------  --
Median time to recovery for the under 50 age group is 14 days.
Median time to recovery for the over 50 age group is 21 days.

p-value  0.000


How many people remain sick a given number of days after diagnosis ?

We again draw Kaplan-Meier curves for each age group, superimposed on the same axes. The steeper slope for those under 50 indicate a quicker recovery for that age group.

In [9]:
figsize = (8,8)
fig = plt.figure(figsize=figsize)
for age, grouped_age in covid_age.groupby('Age Bucket'):
time_to_recovery = grouped_age['time_to_recovery']
event_occured = np.empty(len(time_to_recovery))
event_occured.fill(1)
ax = fig.gca()
ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(mtick.PercentFormatter(1.0))
ax.set(xlabel = 'Days since diagnosis' , ylabel = 'Percentage still sick', title = 'Recovery curves by Age (Kaplan Meier)')
kmf.fit(time_to_recovery, event_occured, label = 'rate of recovery ' + age)
kmf.plot()


## 7. Recovery rates by age and sex¶

For this analysis by age and sex, we use a slightly different approach. We use the Cox Proportional Hazard Model, which estimates the hazard function, which is the instaneous probability of an event's occurence, given it hasn't occured so far. That is, for a given patient, if they haven't recovered until day k, what is the probability that they will recover on day k?

The analysis chooses a baseline group, in this case women over 50, and then assumes proportional hazards for the other groups. That is, the hazard curves for the other groups (females under 50, males under 50 and males over 50) are proportional and can't cross. That is, if an individual has an instantaneous probability of recovery at the initial time point that is twice as high as that of another individual, then at all later times the instantaneous probability of recovery remains twice as high.

Once the model is fit, we notice an extremely high p-value on the male coefficient, this means that there is very low confidence that there is a difference in the instantaneous probability of recovery between men and women.

We also notice a very low p-value in the age coefficient, showing a high level of confidence that there is a difference in the instantaneous probability of recovery of those over 50 compared to those under 50. (By this analysis, on a given day a woman under 50 has a probability of recovery 4.43 times as high as a woman over 50)

In [10]:
from lifelines import CoxPHFitter

covid_recovered['recovered'] = 1
covid_age_gender = covid_recovered[(pd.notnull(covid_recovered['Age Bracketf'])&pd.notnull(covid_recovered['Gender']))]

print(pd.crosstab(covid_age_gender['Age Bucket'], covid_age_gender['Gender']))

cph = CoxPHFitter()
#enc = OneHotEncoder(drop = 'first', categories = [0,1])
Xtrain = covid_age_gender[['Age Bucket','Gender','time_to_recovery','recovered']]

## drop a dummy to avoid the dummy variable trap
Xtrain2 = pd.get_dummies(Xtrain, columns=['Age Bucket', 'Gender'], drop_first=True)

cox_fit = cph.fit(Xtrain2, duration_col='time_to_recovery', event_col='recovered')

cph.print_summary()

Gender       F   M
Age Bucket
over 50     11   8
under 50    11  45

model lifelines.CoxPHFitter 'time_to_recovery' 'recovered' breslow 75 75 -240.29 2020-05-09 21:33:39 UTC
coef exp(coef) se(coef) coef lower 95% coef upper 95% exp(coef) lower 95% exp(coef) upper 95% z p -log2(p)
Age Bucket_under 50 1.49 4.43 0.37 0.76 2.21 2.14 9.15 4.02 <0.005 14.06
Gender_M -0.04 0.96 0.29 -0.61 0.53 0.55 1.69 -0.14 0.89 0.17
Concordance 0.61 23.21 on 2 df 16.74
In [11]:
#cph.plot_covariate_groups(covariates = ['Gender_M', 'Age Bucket_under 50'], values = [[0,1],[0,1]])
cph.plot(hazard_ratios=True)
plt.show()
#close all plots
plt.close('all')


## 8. What did we learn ?¶

Many different assumptions were made in this analysis and we were plagued by sparse, unreliable data, but despite this we did get indications pointing us in the right direction (faster recovery times in younger people). I expect some good criticism of this analysis, but we did learn the following.

1) With a high degree of confidence younger people recover faster than older people.

2) The differences between sexes wasn't as apparent, in fact we couldn't say much with a good degree of confidence.

3) Confounding effects (like disproportionate distribution of age over the sexes) could lead to surprising results like males recovering faster than females.

4) Such analysis may lead to more fruitful results in a larger dataset with more variables. For eg: we could analyze the result of different medications and treatments on recovery times.

5) Recovery times may follow trends similar to fatality rates, with older people taking longer to recovery.

Constructive criticism of this analysis is more than welcome. I'm looking forward to some. Maybe we can work on improving it together! If you enjoyed this analysis, I'm looking for opportunities in Data Science and Machine learning, you can contact me @ [email protected]

In [ ]: