What are the factors that explain the regional variability in Ebola growth rate?

Abstract: The purpose of this project was to determine factors that explain the regional variability in Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) growth rate. The dataset used for this project comes from publicly available sources from Qdatum and HDX websites. These data were cleaned and processed for analyses restricting to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. We used a phenomenological approach to quantify disease spread. In this approach, we first fit a logistic growth curve to time series of cumulative case counts (confirmed and probable) for each region in each country. As a first step, we use linear regression to determine factors that explain regional variability of the growth rate variables. Our preliminary findings suggest there is evidence of logistic growth curve and there are important regional differences.