Authors
Katharine Sherratt, Hugo Gruson, Helen Johnson, Rene Niehus, Bastian Prasse, Frank Sandmann, Jannik Deuschel, Daniel Wolffram, Sam Abbott, Alexander Ullrich, Graham Gibson, Evan L Ray, Nicholas G Reich, Daniel Sheldon, Yijin Wang, Nutcha Wattanachit, Lijing Wang, Jan Trnka, Guillaume Obozinski, Tao Sun, Dorina Thanou, Loic Pottier, Ekaterina Krymova, Jan H Meinke, Maria Vittoria Barbarossa, Neele Leithauser, Jan Mohring, Johanna Schneider, Jaroslaw Wlazlo, Jan Fuhrmann, Berit Lange, Isti Rodiah, Prasith Baccam, Heidi Gurung, Steven Stage, Bradley Suchoski, Jozef Budzinski, Robert Walraven, Inmaculada Villanueva, Vit Tucek, Martin Smid, Milan Zajicek, Cesar Perez Alvarez, Borja Reina, Nikos I Bosse, Sophie R Meakin, Lauren Castro, Geoffrey Fairchild, Isaac Michaud, Dave Osthus, Pierfrancesco Alaimo Di Loro, Antonello Maruotti, Veronika Eclerova, Andrea Kraus, David Kraus, Lenka Pribylova, Bertsimas Dimitris, Michael Lingzhi Li, Soni Saksham, Jonas Dehning, Sebastian Mohr, Viola Priesemann, Grzegorz Redlarski, Benjamin Bejar, Giovanni Ardenghi, Nicola Parolini, Giovanni Ziarelli, Wolfgang Bock, Stefan Heyder, Thomas Hotz, David E Singh, Miguel Guzman-Merino, Jose L Aznarte, David Morina, Sergio Alonso, Enric Alvarez, Daniel Lopez, Clara Prats, Jan Pablo Burgard, Arne Rodloff, Tom Zimmermann, Alexander Kuhlmann, Janez Zibert, Fulvia Pennoni, Fabio Divino, Marti Catala, Gianfranco Lovison, Paolo Giudici, Barbara Tarantino, Francesco Bartolucci, Giovanna Jona Lasinio, Marco Mingione, Alessio Farcomeni, Ajitesh Srivastava, Pablo Montero-Manso, Aniruddha Adiga, Benjamin Hurt, Bryan Lewis, Madhav Marathe, Przemyslaw Porebski, Srinivasan Venkatramanan, Rafal P Bartczuk, Filip Dreger, Anna Gambin, Krzysztof Gogolewski, Magdalena Gruziel-Slomka, Bartosz Krupa, Antoni Moszyński, Karol Niedzielewski, Jedrzej Nowosielski, Maciej Radwan, Franciszek Rakowski, Marcin Semeniuk, Ewa Szczurek, Jakub Zielinski, Jan Kisielewski, Barbara Pabjan, Kirsten Holger, Yuri Kheifetz, Markus Scholz, Biecek Przemyslaw, Marcin Bodych, Maciej Filinski, Radoslaw Idzikowski, Tyll Krueger, Tomasz Ozanski, Johannes Bracher, Sebastian Funk
Publication date
2023/4/21
Journal
Elife
Volume
12
Pages
e81916
Publisher
eLife Sciences Publications Limited
Description
Background:
Short-term forecasts of infectious disease burden can contribute to situational awareness and aid capacity planning. Based on best practice in other fields and recent insights in infectious disease epidemiology, one can maximise the predictive performance of such forecasts if multiple models are combined into an ensemble. Here, we report on the performance of ensembles in predicting COVID-19 cases and deaths across Europe between 08 March 2021 and 07 March 2022.
Methods:
We used open-source tools to develop a public European COVID-19 Forecast Hub. We invited groups globally to contribute weekly forecasts for COVID-19 cases and deaths reported by a standardised source for 32 countries over the next 1–4 weeks. Teams submitted forecasts from March 2021 using standardised quantiles of the predictive distribution. Each week we created an ensemble forecast, where each predictive quantile was calculated as the equally-weighted average (initially the mean and then from 26th July the median) of all individual models’ predictive quantiles. We measured the performance of each model using the relative Weighted Interval Score (WIS), comparing models’ forecast accuracy relative to all other models. We retrospectively explored alternative methods for ensemble forecasts, including weighted averages based on models’ past predictive performance.
Results:
Over 52 weeks, we collected forecasts from 48 unique models. We evaluated 29 models’ forecast scores in comparison to the ensemble model. We found a weekly ensemble had a consistently strong performance across countries over time. Across all horizons and …
Total citations
Scholar articles
K Sherratt, H Gruson, H Johnson, R Niehus, B Prasse… - Elife, 2023