Heatwaves & Death (part 3)

The MSM are keen to highlight reports suggesting significant numbers of deaths due to the 2026 heatwave. I am thus once again busy in the kitchen

If any of the latter part of part 2 came across as gobbledegook, then bear in mind that what I am attempting to do is account for the seasonal variation in death using maximum and minimum weekly temperature as predictors for excess mortality. With this variation (presumably) accounted for I can go on to assess the impact of heatwaves as a series of discrete events. Intervention analysis is the name of the game, and if you ask Google AI what this means it will tell you the following:

Intervention analysis (also known as interrupted time-series analysis) is a quasi-experimental statistical method used to estimate the effect of an exogenous intervention—such as a policy change, law, or external shock—on a time series. It tests the causal hypothesis that observations after a treatment differ significantly in level or slope from those before the intervention, accounting for the autocorrelated structure of the data.

The technique is typically conducted using the Box and Jenkins ARIMA framewor…