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Improving probabilistic infectious disease forecasting through coherence.


ABSTRACT: With an estimated $10.4 billion in medical costs and 31.4 million outpatient visits each year, influenza poses a serious burden of disease in the United States. To provide insights and advance warning into the spread of influenza, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) runs a challenge for forecasting weighted influenza-like illness (wILI) at the national and regional level. Many models produce independent forecasts for each geographical unit, ignoring the constraint that the national wILI is a weighted sum of regional wILI, where the weights correspond to the population size of the region. We propose a novel algorithm that transforms a set of independent forecast distributions to obey this constraint, which we refer to as probabilistically coherent. Enforcing probabilistic coherence led to an increase in forecast skill for 79% of the models we tested over multiple flu seasons, highlighting the importance of respecting the forecasting system's geographical hierarchy.

SUBMITTER: Gibson GC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7837472 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Improving probabilistic infectious disease forecasting through coherence.

Gibson Graham Casey GC   Moran Kelly R KR   Reich Nicholas G NG   Osthus Dave D  

PLoS computational biology 20210106 1


With an estimated $10.4 billion in medical costs and 31.4 million outpatient visits each year, influenza poses a serious burden of disease in the United States. To provide insights and advance warning into the spread of influenza, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) runs a challenge for forecasting weighted influenza-like illness (wILI) at the national and regional level. Many models produce independent forecasts for each geographical unit, ignoring the constraint that the  ...[more]

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