# R0 and the exponential growth of a pandemic, an update

A few days ago, I wrote a blog post – R0 and the exponential growth of a pandemic – where I was trying to generate some visualization of some exponential growth, in the context of a pandemic. After giving some thoughts, the previous graph might not be the best one to see an exponential based contagion.

Having graphs evolving, from the left to the right, gives us the (false) idea of some temporal evolution. Which is no necessarily correct. It simply means that contaminated people will contaminate other people, and we look at the number of iterations here. So maybe some concentric dots would look better.

And from a technical perspective, what I did was fun, but probably too complicated. In my previous post, I wanted to pack optimally $k$ identical disks intro a unit circle. On http://hydra.nat.uni-magdeburg.de/packing, it was possible to get the “best known packings of equal circles in a circle”, with the coordinates. But as we will see, we can use something much more simple here.

My idea is now to create some picture like one below, with concentric colored dot. In the center, we have the first people that were contaminated, and then, we can see the transmission, somehow

From a technical perspective, here, I use a different strategy. I decided to draw random points, uniformly. The problem with randomness is the natural high discrepancy, with monte carlo methods: it is very likely that some disks will overlap. It is not a major issue, but it might distort the message. So I decided to use some low-discrepancy sequences, such as Halton‘s sequence.

library(randtoolbox) S = halton(n=5000, dim = 2)*2-1

Here, I have disk coordinates in $[-1,+1]^2$. Then, to get disks in a circle, I simply compute the distance to the origin $(0,0)$,

D0 = S[,1]^2+S[,2]^2

and take the ranks. If I want to visualize $k=200$ people, I consider the 200 smaller ranks. To get concentric circles, each part having $k_i$ individuals, I use as thresholds $R_0^{\bar k_{i-1}},R_0^{\bar k_{i}},R_0^{\bar k_{i+1}}$, etc, where $\bar k_i=\bar k_{i-1}+k_i$,

R0 = rank(D0,ties.method = "random") C0 = as.numeric(cut(R0,c(0,cumsum(k)+.5)),100000)

where

R0=1.8 k=round(R0^(seq(1,9,by=2)))

Then we can plot the dots, with appropriate colors,

points(S,pch=19,col=colrpal[C0],cex=.75)

And of course, we can try that with different values, for $R_0$

R0=2.2 k=round(R0^(seq(1,9,by=2))) kmax=max(k) S = halton(n=5000, dim = 2)*2-1 plot(S,col="light yellow",axes=FALSE,xlab="",ylab="",xlim=c(-1.3,1),ylim=c(-1,1),cex=.75,pch=19) D0 = S[,1]^2+S[,2]^2 R0 = rank(D0,ties.method = "random") C0 = as.numeric(cut(R0,c(0,cumsum(k)+.5)),100000) points(S,pch=19,col=colrpal[C0],cex=.75)

# Extracting information from a picture, round 2

Yesterday, I published a post on extracting information from a picture, but it did not work as expected. I claimed that it was because of the original graph I had. More precisely, the was based on some weird projection, and I could not reconcile. So I decide to cheat a little bit, by creating my own map,

Colors are ugly, I know. But I got them using

u = seq(0,1,length=30) couleurs = rgb(u,rev(u),0,1)

The picture is

url = "https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/files/2018/12/chomage3.png" library(pixmap) library(png) IMG = readPNG(url)

I used those colors because it would make things easy when extracting reds and greens…

ROUGE=t(IMG[,,1])[x1:x2,] ROUGE=ROUGE[,y2:y1] library(scales) image(x1:x2,y1:y2,ROUGE,col=alpha(colour=rgb(1,0,0,1), alpha = seq(0,1,by=.01))) VERT=t(IMG[,,2])[x1:x2,] VERT=VERT[,y2:y1] image(x1:x2,y1:y2,VERT,col=alpha(colour=rgb(0,1,0,1), alpha = seq(0,1,by=.01)))

Let us see if the contour of France can be overlaid

library(maptools) library(PBSmapping) download.file("http://biogeo.ucdavis.edu/data/gadm2.8/rds/FRA_adm0.rds","FRA_adm0.rds") FR=readRDS("FRA_adm0.rds") library(maptools) PP = SpatialPolygons2PolySet(FR) par(mfrow=c(1,1)) PP=PP[(PP$X&lt;=8.25)&amp;(PP$Y&gt;=42.2),] u=(x1:x2)-x1 v=(y1:y2)-y1 ax=min(PP$X) bx=max(PP$X)-min(PP$X) ay=min(PP$Y) by=max(PP$Y)-min(PP$Y) PP$X=(PP$X-ax)/bx*max(u) PP$Y=(PP$Y-ay)/by*max(v) image(u,v,ROUGE,col=alpha(colour=rgb(1,0,0,1), alpha = seq(0,1,by=.01))) points(PP$X,PP$Y)

We have a perfect match, don’t we…?

Let us now use a shapefile based on départements,

download.file("http://biogeo.ucdavis.edu/data/gadm2.8/rds/FRA_adm2.rds","FRA_adm2.rds") FR2=readRDS("FRA_adm2.rds") library(maptools) PP = SpatialPolygons2PolySet(FR2) image(u,v,ROUGE,col=alpha(colour=rgb(1,0,0,1), alpha = seq(0,1,by=.01))) k=35 pX=(PP$X[PP$PID==k]-ax)/bx*max(u) pY=(PP$Y[PP$PID==k]-ay)/by*max(v) points(pX,pY)nge(pX)

For instance, the thirty-fifth polygon is the following

Let us extract the color inside that polygon

u=1:nrow(ROUGE) v=1:ncol(ROUGE)

The code would be

pX=(PP$X[PP$PID==k]-ax)/bx*max(u) pY=(PP$Y[PP$PID==k]-ay)/by*max(v) E=expand.grid(u,v) M=matrix(point.in.polygon(E[,1],E[,2],pX,pY)&gt;0,length(u),length(v)) image(u,v,ROUGE*M,col=alpha(colour=rgb(1,0,0,1), alpha = seq(0,1,by=.01))) points(pX,pY)

Now, for each département, I extract the average value of red, and the average value of green,

extract_info = function(k){ pX=(PP$X[PP$PID==k]-ax)/bx*max(u) pY=(PP$Y[PP$PID==k]-ay)/by*max(v) E=expand.grid(u,v) M=matrix(point.in.polygon(E[,1],E[,2],pX,pY)&gt;0,length(u),length(v)) nom=FR2[FR2$OBJECTID ==k,c("NAME_2","CCA_2")] return(c(as.numeric(nom$CCA_2),sum(ROUGE[M==1])/sum(M),sum(VERT[M==1])/sum(M))) } donnees = Vectorize(extract_info)(1:95) x2=donnees[1,] y2=donnees[2,]/(donnees[2,]+donnees[3,]) df2=data.frame(dpt=x2,extract=y2) x1=as.numeric(as.character(baseChomage$no)) y1=baseChomage$chomagePremierTrimestre2017 df1=data.frame(dpt=x1,obs=y1) df=merge(df1,df2) plot(df$obs,df$extract)

On the graph below, we have the original values on the x-axis (unemployement, in percent) and the “average value of red”.  Note that points are almost perfectly correlated… The accumulation can be explained because on the original map, different values could have the same color

So far, I can claim that we’ve been able to extract useful information from the original picture.

Consider the case now that the original map was the following one

url = "https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/files/2018/12/chomage5.png" library(pixmap) library(png) IMG = readPNG(url)

Here, the colors are obtained from a standard palette,

library(pals) couleurs = rev(brewer.rdylgn(30))

Here again, we use our previous code to extract reds and greens

And if we use our function

extract_info = function(k){ pX=(PP$X[PP$PID==k]-ax)/bx*max(u) pY=(PP$Y[PP$PID==k]-ay)/by*max(v) E=expand.grid(u,v) M=matrix(point.in.polygon(E[,1],E[,2],pX,pY)&gt;0,length(u),length(v)) nom=FR2[FR2$OBJECTID ==k,c("NAME_2","CCA_2")] return(c(as.numeric(nom$CCA_2),sum(ROUGE[M==1])/sum(M),sum(VERT[M==1])/sum(M))) } donnees = Vectorize(extract_info)(1:95) x2=donnees[1,] y2=donnees[2,]/(donnees[2,]+donnees[3,]) df2=data.frame(dpt=x2,extract=y2) x1=as.numeric(as.character(baseChomage$no)) y1=baseChomage$chomagePremierTrimestre2017 df1=data.frame(dpt=x1,obs=y1) df=merge(df1,df2) plot(df$obs,df$extract)

we obtain the following graph

Here again, we have a strong correlation, not to say comonotonic variables (in the sense that ranks are identical). Nice, isn’t it ?