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Targets and Horizons
There is no obligation to submit forecasts for all suggested countries or horizons, and it is up to you to decide which you are comfortable forecasting with your model.
Please take care when submitting the forecasts to be clear which country and horizon you are using: use this page and the formatting guide.
We are currently focused on the forecast target of:
- Weekly new COVID19 Hospitalisations
We only use incident forecasts: the count of new hospitalisations per week. We do not use cumulative (running total) forecasts.
We evaluate forecasts against COVID19 hospital admissions contained in the target-data folder.
Because data can be subject to ongoing revisions, we assume always the most updated version of the surveillance data. This means that all forecasts are always evaluated against the most updated version of the surveillance data.
Each modelling team is free to use additional data to inform their models and improve forecasting performance.
More information on the data sources, and on the ground truth files we make available to forecasters, is available in the target-data directory.
For forecasts, we focus on horizons between 1 and 4 weeks ahead. The horizon is computed with respect to the week of the last available ground truth target data point and not to the date when the forecast is produced and submitted. Beginning from forecasting round 11 of the 2023-2024 season, we've introduced the inclusion of horizons 0 and -1. These horizons are also calculated in relation to the week of the last available ground truth target data point. Although these horizons are not currently being evaluated, there is potential for their utilisation in the future to gauge the models' capability for nowcasting.
All dates used in the forecast submission should use the ISO week format. Each week starts on Monday and ends on Sunday.
Date conversion helpers include:
- We provide a csv template with the start and end dates for different weeks.
Forecasts should be submitted once per week at any time after new data has been uploaded (between Friday and Monday) and next Wednesday at 23:59 CET.
You can submit a forecast for a single country, or any combination of the target countries. We use ISO-2 codes to identify countries.
Currently we do not accept sub-national forecasts.