Evaluation of individual and ensemble probabilistic forecasts of COVID-19 mortality in the United States.
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2022-04
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Short-term probabilistic forecasts of the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States have served as a visible and important communication channel between the scientific modeling community and both the general public and decision-makers. Forecasting models provide specific, quantitative, and evaluable predictions that inform short-term decisions such as healthcare staffing needs, school closures, and allocation of medical supplies. Starting in April 2020, the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub (https://covid19forecasthub.org/) collected, disseminated, and synthesized tens of millions of specific predictions from more than 90 different academic, industry, and independent research groups. A multimodel ensemble forecast that combined predictions from dozens of groups every week provided the most consistently accurate probabilistic forecasts of incident deaths due to COVID-19 at the state and national level from April 2020 through October 2021. The performance of 27 individual models that submitted complete forecasts of COVID-19 deaths consistently throughout this year showed high variability in forecast skill across time, geospatial units, and forecast horizons. Two-thirds of the models evaluated showed better accuracy than a naïve baseline model. Forecast accuracy degraded as models made predictions further into the future, with probabilistic error at a 20-wk horizon three to five times larger than when predicting at a 1-wk horizon. This project underscores the role that collaboration and active coordination between governmental public-health agencies, academic modeling teams, and industry partners can play in developing modern modeling capabilities to support local, state, and federal response to outbreaks.
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Cramer, Estee Y, Evan L Ray, Velma K Lopez, Johannes Bracher, Andrea Brennen, Alvaro J Castro Rivadeneira, Aaron Gerding, Tilmann Gneiting, et al. (2022). Evaluation of individual and ensemble probabilistic forecasts of COVID-19 mortality in the United States. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119(15). p. e2113561119. 10.1073/pnas.2113561119 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/26494.
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Pan Xu
My research is centered around Machine Learning, with broad interests in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Optimization, Reinforcement Learning, High Dimensional Statistics, and their applications to real-world problems including Bioinformatics and Healthcare. My research goal is to develop computationally- and data-efficient machine learning algorithms with both strong empirical performance and theoretical guarantees.
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