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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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | article |
| Language: | EN |
| Published: |
BMC
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doaj.org/article/06ef8ed3eaae479c8437604776dff12c |
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| Summary: | 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. |
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