Introducing the UK Covid-19 Crowd Forecasting Challenge

Link: https://www.crowdforecastr.org/2021/05/11/uk-challenge/

Twitter thread of results: https://twitter.com/nikosbosse/status/1449043922794188807

Graphic:

Image

Excerpt:

Let’s start with the data. The UK Forecasting Challenge spanned a long period of exponential growth as well as a sudden drop in cases at the end of July 3

Especially this peak was hard to predict and no forecaster really saw it coming. Red: aggregated forecast from different weeks, grey: individual participants. The second picture shows the range for which participants were 50% and 95% confident they would cover the true value

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So what have we learned? – Human forecasts can be valuable to inform public health policy and can sometimes even beat computer models – Ensembles almost always perform better than individuals – Non-experts can be just as good as experts – recruiting participants is hard

Author(s): Nikos Bosse

Publication Date: Accessed 17 Oct 2021, twitter thread 15 Oct 21

Publication Site: Crowdforecastr