A pre-registered short-term forecasting study of COVID-19 in Germany and Poland during the second wave
Name
s41467-021-25207-0.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.67 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
4e80f86d435ae761091834d21ff9ee0a
Author(s)
Bertsimas, Dimitris
Date Issued
2021
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Bertsimas, Dimitris. 2021. "A pre-registered short-term forecasting study of COVID-19 in Germany and Poland during the second wave." Nature Communications, 12 (1).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
AbstractDisease modelling has had considerable policy impact during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and it is increasingly acknowledged that combining multiple models can improve the reliability of outputs. Here we report insights from ten weeks of collaborative short-term forecasting of COVID-19 in Germany and Poland (12 October–19 December 2020). The study period covers the onset of the second wave in both countries, with tightening non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and subsequently a decay (Poland) or plateau and renewed increase (Germany) in reported cases. Thirteen independent teams provided probabilistic real-time forecasts of COVID-19 cases and deaths. These were reported for lead times of one to four weeks, with evaluation focused on one- and two-week horizons, which are less affected by changing NPIs. Heterogeneity between forecasts was considerable both in terms of point predictions and forecast spread. Ensemble forecasts showed good relative performance, in particular in terms of coverage, but did not clearly dominate single-model predictions. The study was preregistered and will be followed up in future phases of the pandemic.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41467-021-25207-0
