Sen's Innovative Method for Trend Analysis of Epidemic: A Case Study of Covid-19 Pandemic in India

Analysis of trend of epidemiological data helps to appreciate the progression of an epidemic and to develop monitoring and control strategies by the government agencies. Sen's Innovative Method suggests a graphical analysis, which can overcome many limitations of data such as short length, non-Gaussian nature, skewness or serial correlation. In this article, this method is applied for the first time on epidemiological data. For the case study, Covid-19 or SARS-CoV-2 data from India were employed. The results show that Sen's Innovative Method is capable of indicating the shift in epidemiological trend quite efficiently, before it is reflected in the time series or moving average plots. The graphical analysis worked particularly well in comparing the trends of monthly data. It is concluded that this method would be especially suitable for monitoring the epidemiological trend by breaking up the data into smaller segments, as was illustrated in the study.