USING THE SEPARATION INDEX TO IDENTIFY THE MOST DOMINANT ROLE: A CASE OF APPLICATION ON COVID-19 OUTBREAK

The study aimed to introduce a new application of the separation index (SI) that allows objective determination of the dominant role in the COVID-19 outbreak which started in the city of Wuhan, China in December 2019 and subsequently spread to other provinces/regions of China as well as the rest of the world The separation index is capable of determining the dominance, also defined as the absolute advantage (or disadvantage) in a comparable group of measures We downloaded COVID-19 outbreak data on a daily basis from Google Sheet that provides information on confirmed cases in more than 30 Chinese locations and other countries/regions Choropleth maps and Kano diagrams were drawn incorporating the 4SQ diagram Three factors were assessed to determine which region played the most dominant role based on (1) the total number of confirmed cases, (2) the death rate, and (3) the SI of daily increase of confirmed cases using the separation index ranging from 0 to 1 0 (cutting at 0 70) We programmed Microsoft Excel VBA routines to arrange the data Visual dashboards were created to display the results on Google Maps We observed that as of February 17, 2020, the top three countries/regions within the three respective elements investigated were Hubei (China), Philippines, and British Columbia, with SI of 0 98, 0 61, and 0 52, respectively The separation index is shown useful and capable in identifying the dominant role in a group Further applications within and outside the context of COVID-19 are worthy of research effort