Improving probabilistic infectious disease forecasting through coherence

PLoS Comput Biol. 2021 Jan 6;17(1):e1007623. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007623. eCollection 2021 Jan.

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.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Communicable Diseases / epidemiology*
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Databases, Factual
  • Forecasting / methods*
  • Humans
  • Influenza, Human / epidemiology
  • Least-Squares Analysis
  • Models, Statistical*
  • United States