Understanding the COVID-19 pandemic prevalence in Africa through optimal feature selection and clustering: evidence from a statistical perspective

Mohamed Lamine Sidibé; Roland Yonaba; Fowé Tazen; Héla Karoui; Ousmane Koanda; Babacar Lèye; Harinaivo Anderson Andrianisa; Harouna Karambiri

doi:10.1007/s10668-022-02646-3

Understanding the COVID-19 pandemic prevalence in Africa through optimal feature selection and clustering: evidence from a statistical perspective

Environ Dev Sustain. 2022 Aug 30:1-29. doi: 10.1007/s10668-022-02646-3. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Mohamed Lamine Sidibé¹, Roland Yonaba¹, Fowé Tazen¹, Héla Karoui¹, Ousmane Koanda¹, Babacar Lèye¹, Harinaivo Anderson Andrianisa¹, Harouna Karambiri¹

Affiliation

¹ Laboratoire Eaux, Hydro-Systèmes Et Agriculture (LEHSA), Institut International d'Ingénierie de l'Eau Et de l'Environnement (2iE), 1 Rue de la Science, 01 BP 594, Ouagadougou 01, Burkina Faso.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, which outbroke in Wuhan (China) in December 2019, severely hit almost all sectors of activity in the world as a consequence of the restrictive measures imposed. Two years later, Africa still emerges as the least affected continent by the pandemic. This study analyzed COVID-19 prevalence across African countries through country-level variables prior to clustering. Using Spearman-rank correlation, multicollinearity analysis and univariate filtering, 9 country-level variables were identified from an initial set of 34 variables. These variables relate to socioeconomic status, population structure, healthcare system and environment and the climatic setting. A clustering of the 54 African countries is further carried out through the use of agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) method, which generated 3 distinctive clusters. Cluster 1 (11 countries) is the most affected by COVID-19 (median of 63,508.6 confirmed cases and 946.5 deaths per million) and is composed of countries with the highest socioeconomic status. Cluster 2 (27 countries) is the least affected (median of 4473.7 confirmed cases and 81.2 deaths per million), and mainly features countries with the least socioeconomic features and international exposure. Cluster 3 (16 countries) is intermediate in terms of COVID-19 prevalence (median of 2569.3 confirmed cases and 35.7 deaths per million) and features countries the least urbanized and geographically close to the equator, with intermediate international exposure and socioeconomic features. These findings shed light on the main features of COVID-19 prevalence in Africa and might help refine effectively coping management strategies of the ongoing pandemic.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10668-022-02646-3.

Keywords: Africa; COVID-19; Cluster analysis; Hierarchical clustering; Pandemic; Transmission factors.

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