A Review of Spatiotemporal Models for Count Data in R Packages. A Case Study of COVID-19 Data

Abstract

Spatiotemporal models for count data are required in a wide range of scientific fields, and they have become particularly crucial today because of their ability to analyze COVID-19-related data. The main objective of this paper is to present a review describing the most important approaches, and we monitor their performance under the same dataset. For this review, we focus on the three R-packages that can be used for this purpose, and the different models assessed are representative of the two most widespread methodologies used to analyze spatiotemporal count data: the classical approach and the Bayesian point of view. A COVID-19-related case study is analyzed as an illustration of these different methodologies. Because of the current urgent need for monitoring and predicting data in the COVID-19 pandemic, this case study is, in itself, of particular importance and can be considered the secondary objective of this work. Satisfactory and promising results have been obtained in this second goal. With respect to the main objective, it has been seen that, although the three models provide similar results in our case study, their different properties and flexibility allow us to choose the model depending on the application at hand.