Using prediction polling to harness collective intelligence for disease forecasting

Abstract Background The global spread of COVID-19 has shown that reliable forecasting of public health related outcomes is important but lacking. Methods We report the results of the first large-scale, long-term experiment in crowd-forecasting of infectious-disease outbreaks, where a total of 562 vo...

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Autores principales: Tara Kirk Sell, Kelsey Lane Warmbrod, Crystal Watson, Marc Trotochaud, Elena Martin, Sanjana J. Ravi, Maurice Balick, Emile Servan-Schreiber
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: BMC 2021
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Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/06ef8ed3eaae479c8437604776dff12c
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Sumario:Abstract Background The global spread of COVID-19 has shown that reliable forecasting of public health related outcomes is important but lacking. Methods We report the results of the first large-scale, long-term experiment in crowd-forecasting of infectious-disease outbreaks, where a total of 562 volunteer participants competed over 15 months to make forecasts on 61 questions with a total of 217 possible answers regarding 19 diseases. Results Consistent with the “wisdom of crowds” phenomenon, we found that crowd forecasts aggregated using best-practice adaptive algorithms are well-calibrated, accurate, timely, and outperform all individual forecasters. Conclusions Crowd forecasting efforts in public health may be a useful addition to traditional disease surveillance, modeling, and other approaches to evidence-based decision making for infectious disease outbreaks.