Using prediction polling to harness collective intelligence for disease forecasting

ABSTRACT:

Background

The global spread of COVID-19 has shown that reliable forecasting of public health related outcomes is important but lacking.

Methods

We report the results of the first large-scale, long-term experiment in crowd-forecasting of infectious-disease outbreaks, where a total of 562 volunteer participants competed over 15 months to make forecasts on 61 questions with a total of 217 possible answers regarding 19 diseases.

Results

Consistent with the “wisdom of crowds” phenomenon, we found that crowd forecasts aggregated using best-practice adaptive algorithms are well-calibrated, accurate, timely, and outperform all individual forecasters.

Conclusions

Crowd forecasting efforts in public health may be a useful addition to traditional disease surveillance, modeling, and other approaches to evidence-based decision making for infectious disease outbreaks.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-021-12083-y.

SUBMITTER: Sell T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8605461 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature