Classical supervised methods like linear regression and decision trees are not completely adapted for identifying impacting factors on a response variable corresponding to zero-inflated proportion data (ZIPD) that are dependent, continuous and bounded. In this article we propose a within-block permutation-based methodology to identify factors (discrete or continuous) that are significantly correlated with ZIPD, we propose a performance indicator quantifying the percentage of correlation explained by the subset of significant factors, and we show how to predict the ranks of the response variables conditionally on the observation of these factors. The methodology is illustrated on simulated data and on two real data sets dealing with epidemiology. In the first data set, ZIPD correspond to probabilities of transmission of Influenza between horses. In the second data set, ZIPD correspond to probabilities that geographic entities (eg, states and countries) have the same COVID-19 mortality dynamics.
Keywords: COVID-19; Spearman's correlation; equine influenza; performance indicator; permutation test; ranking.
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