Related papers: Evaluating epidemic forecasts in an interval forma…
Background: Over the past few decades, numerous forecasting methods have been proposed in the field of epidemic forecasting. Such methods can be classified into different categories such as deterministic vs. probabilistic, comparative…
The COVID-19 pandemic has placed forecasting models at the forefront of health policy making. Predictions of mortality and hospitalization help governments meet planning and resource allocation challenges. In this paper, we consider the…
Recent years have seen increasing efforts to forecast infectious disease burdens, with a primary goal being to help public health workers make informed policy decisions. However, there has only been limited discussion of how predominant…
Forecasts for uncertain future events should be probabilistic. Probabilistic forecasts are commonly issued as prediction intervals, which provide a measure of uncertainty in the unknown outcome whilst being easier to understand and…
Estimates from infectious disease models have constituted a significant part of the scientific evidence used to inform the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. These estimates can vary strikingly in their bias and variability.…
Infectious disease forecasting for ongoing epidemics has been traditionally performed, communicated, and evaluated as numerical targets - 1, 2, 3, and 4 week ahead cases, deaths, and hospitalizations. While there is great value in…
The U.S. COVID-19 Forecast Hub aggregates forecasts of the short-term burden of COVID-19 in the United States from many contributing teams. We study methods for building an ensemble that combines forecasts from these teams. These…
Epidemic modeling is an essential tool to understand the spread of the novel coronavirus and ultimately assist in disease prevention, policymaking, and resource allocation. In this article, we establish a state of the art interface between…
Reliable short term forecasting can provide potentially lifesaving insights into logistical planning, and in particular, into the optimal allocation of resources such as hospital staff and equipment. By reinterpreting COVID-19 daily cases…
Scientific advice to the UK government throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has been informed by ensembles of epidemiological models provided by members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza group on Modelling (SPI-M). Among other applications,…
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought forth the importance of epidemic forecasting for decision makers in multiple domains, ranging from public health to the economy as a whole. While forecasting epidemic progression is frequently…
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many dashboards have emerged as useful tools to monitor the evolution of the pandemic, inform the public, and assist governments in decision making. Our goal is to develop a globally applicable…
Forecasting new cases, hospitalizations, and disease-induced deaths is an important part of infectious disease surveillance and helps guide health officials in implementing effective countermeasures. For disease surveillance in the U.S.,…
Across the world, scholars are racing to predict the spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. Such predictions are often pursued by numerically simulating epidemics with a large number of plausible combinations of relevant parameters. It…
Accurate numbers are needed to understand and predict viral dynamics. Curation of high-quality literature values for the infectious period duration or household secondary attack rate, for example, is especially pressing currently because…
Forecasting methodologies have always attracted a lot of attention and have become an especially hot topic since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper we consider the problem of multi-period forecasting that aims to predict…
Evaluating forecasts is essential to understand and improve forecasting and make forecasts useful to decision makers. A variety of R packages provide a broad variety of scoring rules, visualisations and diagnostic tools. One particular…
In order for epidemiological forecasts to be useful for decision-makers the forecasts need to be properly validated and evaluated. Although several metrics fore evaluation have been proposed and used none of them account for the potential…
This paper addresses statistical modelling and forecasting of key indicators describing the severity of a developing pandemic, using routinely reported daily counts of infections, hospitalizations, deaths (both in and out of hospital), and…
The evolution of the COVID-19 epidemic has been accompanied by accumulating evidence on the underlying epidemiological parameters. Hence there is potential for models providing mid-term forecasts of the epidemic trajectory using such…