European COVID-19 Forecast Hub

We are aggregating forecasts of new cases and deaths due to Covid-19 over the next four weeks in countries across Europe and the UK.

Latest forecasts
README contents

Quick start

This is a brief outline for anyone considering contributing a forecast. For a detailed guide on how to structure and submit a forecast, please read the technical wiki.

Set up

Before contributing for the first time:

Forecasting

We require some forecast parameters so that we can compare and ensemble forecasts. All forecasts should use the following structure:

Parameter Description
Target Cases, hospitalisations and/or deaths
Count Incident
Geography EU/EFTA/UK nations (any/all)
Frequency Weekly
Horizon 1 to 4 weeks

There is no obligation to submit forecasts for all suggested targets or horizons, and it is up to you to decide which you are comfortable forecasting with your model.

We have written more about forecast targets, horizons, and locations in the guide.

Dates

We use Epidemiological Weeks (EW) defined by the US CDC. Each week starts on Sunday and ends on Saturday. We provide more details here, and templates to convert dates to EW weeks (and vice versa).

Truth data

We base evaluations on country level data from Johns Hopkins University.

Submitting

Forecasts should be submitted on Monday by opening a pull request in this repository. So that we can evaluate and ensemble forecasts, we ask for a specific file structure and naming format: our wiki contains a detailed guide. If you have technical difficulties with submission, try troubleshooting or get in touch by raising an issue.

Evaluating and ensembling

After teams have submitted their forecasts, we create an ensemble forecast. Note that the ensemble only includes the forecasts that completely match the standard format (for example those with all the specified quantiles). See the inclusion criteria for more details.

We also publish some weekly evaluation across forecasting models.

About Covid-19 forecasting hubs

This effort parallels forecasting hubs in the US and Germany. We follow a similar structure and data format, and re-use software provided by the ReichLab.

European forecast hub team

This repository is maintained by Epiforecasts. It is based on and supported by members of the US, and German and Polish Forecast Hubs. A small team is adapting this work for the European forecasting hub. We are based at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and supported by grant funding from the ECDC.

Direct contributors to this repository include (in alphabetical order):

The interactive visualization tool (code available here) has been developed by the Signale Team at Robert Koch Institute:

  • Fabian Eckelmann
  • Knut Perseke
  • Alexander Ullrich

Data license and reuse

  • The forecasts assembled in this repository have been created by independent teams. Most provide a license in their respective subfolder of data-processed.
  • Parts of the processing, analysis and validation code have been taken or adapted from the US Covid-19 forecast hub and the Germany/Poland Covid-19 forecast hub both under an MIT license.
  • All code contained in this repository is under the MIT license. Please get in touch with us to re-use materials from this repository.