Transitioning from the German Polish COVID19 Forecast Hub

This overview is preliminary as certain aspects are yet to be decided for the European Forecast Hub. We will add more details and references to updated documentation soon.

We here compile an overview of things to keep in mind when transitioning from the German and Polish to the European COVID-19 Forecast Hub.

What stays the same:

• The basic folder structure with a model-specific subfolder in data-processed (naming convention team-model).
• The forecast file format with point forecasts and 23 forecast quantiles and naming of files (YYYY-mm-dd-team-model.csv).
• Case and death forecasts will be collected.
• The use of epi weeks running from Sunday to Saturday.
• The submission via GitHub pull requests (you just need to fork the covid19-forecast-hub-europe repository).
• All evaluation criteria which will be applied to your forecasts (weighted interval score, absolute error, interval coverage rates).

What changes:

• No daily forecasts will be accepted.
• Only incidence forecasts will be covered (i.e. k wk ahead inc death and k wk ahead inc case). Cumulative targets will not be covered.
• No hospitalization/ICU forecasts will be accepted (technically this is possible in the DE/PL platform, even though we are currently not showing these forecasts in our visualization).
• The authoritative truth data source is JHU.
• Forecasts need to be submitted in a single file per submission date (pooling over countries and targets), the naming convention being YYYY-mm-dd-team_name-model_name.csv.
• Use of rows with type = "observed" has been deprecated as there is only one truth data source. Including them will cause validation checks to fail.
• An (optional) additional column called scenario_id can be included. If included, this needs to be set to "forecast" in all rows for short-term forecasts. Other scenarios (e.g., on vaccination strategies) may be added in the future.
• At least in the beginning only national level forecasts will be accepted (i.e. no Bundesländer and voivodeships).
• Location codes have been changed to ISO 3166-1 alpha-2. This means you need to use "DE" for Germany and "PL" for Poland.
• Starting from the fist official submission date on 8 March, the submission deadline will be Monday 11:59pm.
• The metadata format has been updated and will be checked more strictly. Metadata files are compulsory in the European COVID-19 Forecast Hub.