The Flu MetroCast Hub is a modeling hub with the goal of collecting city- and county-level forecasts of influenza activity. It is a project led by the epiENGAGE team from UT-Austin and UMass-Amherst, as a part of the CDC Insight Net program. Anyone interested in using these data for additional research or publications is requested to contact Dongah Kim for information regarding attribution of the source forecasts.
The Flu MetroCast Hub makes public forecasts for New York City, and is open to adding forecasts for other jurisdictions that have public data. For New York City, the influenza-related data are Emergency Department (ED) visits due to Influenza-like Illness (ILI), but other data sources could be modeled as well, such as the percentage of outpatient visits with a primary complaint of ILI or count of all hospitalizations due to influenza.
Dates: The Challenge Period will begin on January 22, 2025 and will run until May 2025. Participants are currently asked to submit forecasts by Wednesday evenings at 8pm ET (herein referred to as the Forecast Due Date). In the event that timelines of data availability change, Flu MetroCast may change the day of week that forecasts are due. In this case, participants would be notified at least one week in advance. Weekly submissions will be specified in terms of the reference date, which is the Saturday following the Forecast Due Date. The reference date is the last day of the epidemiological week (EW) (Sunday to Saturday) containing the Forecast Due Date. The reference date must be included in the file name for any model submission.
Prediction Targets: Participating teams are asked to provide city- or county-level predictions for the target relevant to each jurisdiction.
| Jurisdiction | Target name | Target description |
|---|---|---|
| New York City (NYC) | ILI ED visits | Number of Emergency Department visits due to influenza |
For NYC, teams will submit predictions of new ED visits due to ILI for the epidemiological week (EW) ending on the reference date (horizon = 0) as well as for horizons 1 through 4. Teams can but are not required to submit forecasts for all horizons.
The evaluation data for forecasts will be the weekly aggregate of daily ED visits for each jurisdiction. We will use the specification of EWs defined by the CDC, which run Sunday through Saturday. The target end date for a prediction is the Saturday that ends an EW of interest, and can be calculated using the expression: target end date = reference date + horizon * (7 days).
There are standard software packages to convert from dates to epidemic weeks and vice versa (e.g. MMWRweek and lubridate for R and pymmwr and epiweeks for Python).
If you have questions about this target, please reach out to Dongah Kim.
This repository follows the guidelines and standards outlined by the hubverse, which provides a set of data formats and open source tools for modeling hubs.