Other Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology Commons^™

Improving Probabilistic Infectious Disease Forecasting Through Coherence, Graham Casey Gibson, Kelly R. Moran, Nicholas G. Reich, Dave Osthus

Biostatistics and Epidemiology Faculty Publications Series

Author summary Seasonal influenza causes a significant public health burden nationwide. Accurate influenza forecasting may help public health officials allocate resources and plan responses to emerging outbreaks. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports influenza data at multiple geographical units, including regionally and nationally, where the national data are by construction a weighted sum of the regional data. In an effort to improve influenza forecast accuracy across all models submitted to the CDC's annual flu forecasting challenge, we examined the effect of imposing this geographical constraint on the set of independent forecasts, made publicly available by the …