Temporal analysis of daily climatic factors and hospitalizations
Abstract
We investigate daily time series of all hospital admissions, temperature, wind speed and amount of rainfall from November to December 2008 in Cavite, Philippines. The relationship between each dataset was evaluated using three statistical measures: correlation coefficient, mutual information and transfer entropy. Results show that there is a low mutual dependence between the hospitalizations and low correlation between climatic factors and hospital cases. However, it was found out that the rates of incidence of female and male reproductive diseases were directly proportional and that rainfall can be a driving mechanism to typhoid fever incidence, diurnal temperature range to cancer distribution, rainfall to accident cases, maximum temperature to cancer and average wind speed to dengue incidence. These results suggest that the low correlations do not imply that the datasets do not affect each other but indicate a possible delay on the onset of disease.