## Summary - Based on the hubverse project - Hubverse is targeting support of forecasting, nowcasting, and estimation of parameters with the aim to be usable for other kinds of targets. - Inherits the infrastructure from the COVID-19 European forecast hub - Targets: ILI and ARI incidence - Same general submission framework as for the previous COVID-19 hubs. - Technical meeting for Respicast contributors: 7th December (Thursday) 13:00 - 14:00 CET ## Minutes ### Rene - EU has had a lot of successful hubs and so have others. - They have been found to be very useful - Launching a new combined hub ### Nick Reich ### The state of forecasting ![[2023-11-20-respicast-state-of-forecasting.png]] #### The Hubverse - The tools we wish we had during the pandemic - Open source tooling to support these estimates. - Framework for forecasting, nowcasting, parameter estimates, its very general. - Reduce the need for duplicative tool development. - Think carefully in a statistical way about how to support different formats of forecasts - Read more at [hubdocs.readthedocs.io](https://hubdocs.readthedocs.io) #### What have we done so far? - Fluhub in the US uses hub tools already. Others will follow. - 5 packages to support the different parts of the hub. ![[2023-11-20-respicast-hubverse-outline.png]] ### Sasikiran Kandula #### Introduction - Norwegian institute of public health - COVID-19 response in norway: - Situational awareness - Short-term forecasts - Scenario modelling - Started submitting forecasts in March 2023 for all outcomes: Cases, hospitalisations, and deaths. - All model development is in R - Used low computationally models that run less than an hour on a standard laptop - Only use publicly available datasets #### Models - Stochastic SEIR model fit using SMC - `{fable}` based time-series models (ARIMA and exponential trend smoothing) - Ensembling: - Use weighted interval score-based ensembling. Look at the last 3 weeks of performance - Weights are location and target-specific - Updated each week - Only submit the "best" model of their pool in any given week but this is usually the ensemble. #### Evaluation - Visually track forecast performance week on week and try and identify drifts in performance. - Visual model comparison of ensemble and component models. - Sample question: Does the ensemble dampen some extreme behaviour? - Track WIS over time #### Flusight - Now submitting to the Flusight challenge. - Essentially the same approach - Use past seasons prior to submitting to evaluate a complete season #### What is the value to us? - Fair model evaluation - Open science: data, methods, code, and access\ - Standardisation: ground truth, target definitions, metrics - The community: - Modellers - Decision makers using the forecasts - As an agency - The evidence base for the adoption of methods in agency - Reusing methods/tools in other disease domains - Hub ensemble is likely to be the best choice - Community of practice we can reach out to. #### Adapting the current European COVID-19 forecast hub into a European Respiratory disease forecasting hub - Building on all the other hubs. Working with those involved with the previous EU hub. - Forecasting is important: Close the loop between data, models, and public health decisions ![[2023-11-20-respicast-framework.png]] - Its all about the data. We couldn't do anything with reliable standardised data. - Community building is really the main goal - Hub based on ILI + ARI incidence. - Evaluation using WIS and absolute error - See more at [respicast.ecdc.europa.eu](https://respicast.ecdc.europa.eu]) - The current hub is very similar to the European COVID-19 hub ![[Screenshot 2023-11-20 at 13.47.57.png]] - Automated submission via GitHub Actions will not be supported (i.e. [european-modelling-hubs/covid19-forecast-hub-europe-submissions](https://github.com/european-modelling-hubs/covid19-forecast-hub-europe-submissions "https://github.com/european-modelling-hubs/covid19-forecast-hub-europe-submissions")) at least initially. - Technical meeting for Respicast contributors: 7th December (Thursday) 13:00 - 14:00 CET ## Tags - #forecasting - #forecasting/hubs - #influenza - #covid-19 - #community-building