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Evaluating epidemic forecasts in an interval format

Open access
Bracher, Johannes, Ray, Evan L., Gneiting, Tilmann, Reich, Nicholas G.·2021·PLOS Computational Biology

Abstract

For practical reasons, many forecasts of case, hospitalization, and death counts in the context of the current Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic are issued in the form of central predictive intervals at various levels. This is also the case for the forecasts collected in the COVID-19 Forecast Hub(https://covid19forecasthub.org/). Forecast evaluation metrics like the logarithmic score, which has been applied in several infectious disease forecasting challenges, are then not available as they require full predictive distributions. This article provides an overview of how established methods for the evaluation of quantile and interval forecasts can be applied to epidemic forecasts in this format. Specifically, we discuss the computation and interpretation of the weighted interval score, which is a proper score that approximates the continuous ranked probability score. It can be interpreted as a generalization of the absolute error to probabilistic forecasts and allows for a decomposition into a measure of sharpness and penalties for over- and underprediction.

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Metadata

Authors
Bracher, J., Ray, E. L., Gneiting, T., & Reich, N. G.
Venue
PLOS Computational Biology
Published
2021-02-12
Volume
17
Issue
2
Pages
e1008618
ISSN
  • 1553-734X (ISSN-L)
  • 1553-7358
OpenAlex
W3031381838
Cited by
285
References
33
FWCI
15.75
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Evaluating epidemic forecasts in an interval format. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008618
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Bracher, J., Ray, E. L., Gneiting, T., & Reich, N. G. (2021). Evaluating epidemic forecasts in an interval format. PLOS Computational Biology. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008618

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