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Abstract COVID-19 is a global crisis where India is going to be one of the most heavily affected countries. The variability in the distribution of COVID-19-related health outcomes might be related to many underlying variables, including demographic, socioeconomic, or environmental pollution related factors. The global and local models can be utilized to explore such relations. In this study, ordinary least square (global) and geographically weighted regression (local) methods are employed to explore the geographical relationships between COVID-19 deaths and different driving factors. It is also investigated whether geographical heterogeneity exists in the relationships. More specifically, in this paper, the geographical pattern of COVID-19 deaths and its relationships with different potential driving factors in India are investigated and analysed. Here, better knowledge and insights into geographical targeting of intervention against the COVID-19 pandemic can be generated by investigating the heterogeneity of spatial relationships. The results show that the local method (geographically weighted regression) generates better performance ( $$R^{2}=0.97$$ R 2 = 0.97 ) with smaller Akaike Information Criterion (AICc $$=-66.42$$ = - 66.42 ) as compared to the global method (ordinary least square). The GWR method also comes up with lower spatial autocorrelation (Moran’s $$I=-0.0395$$ I = - 0.0395 and $$p < 0.01$$ p < 0.01 ) in the residuals. It is found that more than 86% of local $$R^{2}$$ R 2 values are larger than 0.60 and almost 68% of $$R^{2}$$ R 2 values are within the range 0.80–0.97. Moreover, some interesting local variations in the relationships are also found.

This paper proposes and evaluates the novel utilization of small world network properties for the formation of team of players with both best performances and best belongingness within the team network. To verify this concept, this methodology is applied to T-20 cricket teams. The players are treated as nodes of the network, whereas the number of interactions between team members is denoted as the edges between those nodes. All intra country networks form the cricket network for this case study. Analysis of the networks depicts that T-20 cricket network inherits all characteristics of small world network. Making a quantitative measure for an individual performance in the team sports is important with respect to the fact that for team selection of an International match, from pool of best players, only eleven players can be selected for the team. The statistical record of each player considered as a traditional way of quantifying the performance of a player. But the other criteria such as performing against a strong opponent or performance as an effective team member such as fielding, running between the wickets, good partnership deserves more credential. In this paper a revised method based on social networking is presented to quantify the quality of team belongingness and efficiency of each player. The application of Social Network Analysis (SNA) is explored to measure performances and the rank of the players. A bidirectional weighted network of players is generated using the information collected from T-20 cricket (2014–2016) and used for network analysis. Thus team was formed based on that ranking and compared with their IPL (Indian Premier League) performances of 2016.