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Sparse HP Filter: Finding Kinks in the COVID-19 Contact Rate

Sokbae Lee, Yuan Liao, Myung Hwan Seo, Youngki Shin

arXiv 18 Jun 2020 · Econometrics · publishedJournal of Econometrics (2020) · 7 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2006.10555 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

In this paper, we estimate the time-varying COVID-19 contact rate of a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model. Our measurement of the contact rate is constructed using data on actively infected, recovered and deceased cases. We propose a new trend filtering method that is a variant of the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter, constrained by the number of possible kinks. We term it the $sparse HP filter$ and apply it to daily data from five countries: Canada, China, South Korea, the UK and the US. Our new method yields the kinks that are well aligned with actual events in each country. We find that the sparse HP filter provides a fewer kinks than the $\ell_1$ trend filter, while both methods fitting data equally well. Theoretically, we establish risk consistency of both the sparse HP and $\ell_1$ trend filters. Ultimately, we propose to use time-varying $contact growth rates$ to document and monitor outbreaks of COVID-19.

Citation extraction

57
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appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 92% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Hethcote, H. W (2000) The mathematics of infectious diseases0.81142100%
2Fern'andez-Villaverde, J. and C. I. Jones (2020) Estimating and simulating a SIRD model of COVID-19 for many countries, states, and cities0.73732100%
3Liu, L., H. R. Moon, and F. Schorfheide (2020) Panel forecasts of country-level Covid-19 infections0.73732100%
4Acemoglu, D., V. Chernozhukov, I. Werning, and M. D. Whinston (2020) Optimal targeted lockdowns in a multi-group SIR model0.64422100%
5Hodrick, R. J. and E. C. Prescott (1997) Postwar U.S. business cycles: An empirical investigation0.64422100%
6Dong, E., H. Du, and L. Gardner (2020) An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real time0.64422100%
7The New York Times (2020) See which states and cities have told residents to stay at home0.64422100%
8Pindyck, R. S (2020) COVID-19 and the welfare effects of reducing contagion0.64422100%
9Kim, S.-J., K. Koh, S. Boyd, and D. Gorinevsky (2009) $_1$ trend filtering0.64422100%
10Kim, Y.-J., M. H. Seo, and H.-E. Yeom (2020) Estimating a breakpoint in the pattern of spread of covid-19 in south korea self0.64422100%

Showing the top 10 of 58 scored citations.

Cited by, within the corpus

arXiv econ.EM papers that cite this one, ranked by how heavily they lean on it.

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
115pt Business Cycle Synchronization in the EU: A Regional-Sectoral Look through Soft-Clustering and Wavelet Decomposition0.40511
2The boosted HP filter is more general than you might think0.40511