Papers › The Skellam Distribution revisited -Estimating the unobserved incoming and outgoing...
The Skellam Distribution revisited -Estimating the unobserved incoming and outgoing ICU COVID-19 patients on a regional level in Germany
Martje Rave, Göran Kauermann
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
With the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we became aware of the need for comprehensive data collection and its provision to scientists and experts for proper data analyses. In Germany, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) has tried to keep up with this demand for data on COVID-19, but there were (and still are) relevant data missing that are needed to understand the whole picture of the pandemic. In this paper, we take a closer look at the severity of the course of COVID-19 in Germany, for which ideal information would be the number of incoming patients to ICU units. This information was (and still is) not available. Instead, the current occupancy of ICU units on the district level was reported daily. We demonstrate how this information can be used to predict the number of incoming as well as released COVID-19 patients using a stochastic version of the Expectation Maximisation algorithm (SEM). This in turn, allows for estimating the influence of district-specific and age-specific infection rates as well as further covariates, including spatial effects, on the number of incoming patients. The paper demonstrates that even if relevant data are not recorded or provided officially, statistical modelling allows for reconstructing them. This also includes the quantification of uncertainty which naturally results from the application of the SEM algorithm.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Datasets
Introduced by this paper, per the archive.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections