Ensemble forecasts of COVID-19 activity to support Australia’s pandemic response: 2020–22
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries used real-time data analyses, predictive modelling, and COVID-19 case forecasts, to incorporate emerging evidence into their decisions. In Australia, national and jurisdictional public health responses were informed by weekly ensemble forecasts of daily COVID-19 case counts for each of Australia's eight states and territories, produced by a consortium of researchers under contract with the Australian Government. As members of this consortium, who produced these forecasts at each week, we now retrospectively evaluate approximately 100,000 predictions for daily case counts 1-28 days into the future, generated between July 2020 and December 2022, and report here (a) how the ensemble forecasts supported public health responses; (b) how well the ensemble forecast performed, relative to the forecasts produced by each contributing team; and (c) how we refined our reporting and visualisations to ensure that outputs were interpreted appropriately. Similar to COVID-19 forecasting studies in other countries, we found that the ensemble forecast consistently out-performed the individual model forecasts, and that performance was lowest when there were rapid changes in the epidemiology, such as periods around epidemic peaks. Our consortium's internal peer-review process allowed us to explain how features of each ensemble forecast related to the design of the individual models, and this helped enable public health stakeholders to interpret the forecasts appropriately. Ultimately, our forecasts provided information that supported public health responses during periods of different policy goals, and over a wide range of epidemic scenarios.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".