The COVID-19 Forecast Hub: Using Statistics and Data Science to Support Decision-making in a Pandemic
Speaker
Dr. Nicholas G Reich, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Abstract
The COVID-19 Forecast Hub is a consortium of modeling teams from across the world making forecasts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. Launched in March 2020, the Hub has aggregated over 40m rows of data from over 40 different models. The forecast data are available publicly, and are fed weekly to the CDC's COVID-19 forecasting website: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/forecasting-us.html. In addition to serving as a central repository of forecast data, the Hub also actively develops and releases weekly an ensemble forecast that combines together a subset of the submitted models. This talk will describe the process of building and maintaining the Hub, from the data model used to represent forecasts to the statistical challenges in building and evaluating an ensemble forecast in real-time. More information about the COVID-19 Forecast Hub can be found at https://covid19forecasthub.org.
Agenda
About the Speaker
Dr. Nicholas G Reich is an Associate Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He received a PhD in Biostatistics from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. His research team at UMass has developed statistical methods and open-source tools for creating probabilistic, ensemble forecasts of infectious disease outbreaks in real-time. His team leads two international infectious disease forecasting consortia, including the FluSight Network and the COVID-19 Forecast Hub. Dr. Reich is the director of an Influenza Forecasting Center of Excellence, funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Read more about his research lab at https://reichlab.io.
Host
Sponsor
Website
Location
Policy
