The distance correlation R was used to select the information relevant to the prediction of influenza rate not only with respect to the response but also among the possible covariates to avoid collinearities. The results are shown in Table 6. Relative humidity, Humn,s(t), has the lowest correlation with the influenza rate {Raten+1,s, Raten+2,s} and therefore, it seems that its contribution to the response is negligible (a model with Humn,s(t) never improves one without the variate). Besides, the distance correlation values are useful for designing models avoiding closely related covariates (for instance, Tempn,s(t) and Temp.thn,s(t) share the same information). With these considerations, the number of possible different models to be tested is quite reduced.