This page will serve as example of where one might find the statistics and math they learn in the classroom in their daily lives. The methodologies, and more importantly the line of thinking, are becoming more and more prevalent in the world we live in. Given this, it is important to see the connection between statistical research, data visualization, statistical inference/data analysis as part of very many job descriptions. Here is an awesome app from uber Kepler that allows you to make cool visualizations.
Overview
The COVID-19 Forecat Hub was founded in March 2020 by the Reich Lab of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has been supported since then by a small but dedicated group of faculty, post-docs, and students from UMass, Iowa State, Carnegie Mellon, and international research groups. The Reich Lab has worked closely with the US CDC on their FluSight seasonal influenza forecasting challenges since 2015. In September 2019, the Reich Lab was designated as one of two nationwide, CDC-funded Influenza Forecasting Centers of Excellence. Our team has worked closely with global, federal, state and local public health officials to integrate infectious disease forecasting into public health decision-making. Additionally, our group’s peer-reviewed and pre-publication research has provided crucial insights about the importance of ensemble modeling in forecasting outbreaks and the relative accuracy of a wide range of different forecast models.
Forecast Hub pipeline
Teams submit, for the state and national level in the US, predictions of the numbers of new hospitalizations and incident and cumulative deaths in future days, weeks, and months. We encourage teams to submit at least one forecast every week (up to one a day is accepted) before a Monday 6pm deadline. After this deadline passes, we create an ensemble forecast that, similar to weather forecast models, combines multiple models into a single prediction and cone of uncertainty.
Every Tuesday morning, our latest ensemble forecast is available for browsing at our interactive visualization. Additionally, all model data are passed along to the US CDC, and individual forecasts from the teams, as well as the ensemble forecast, are used in official CDC communications about the trajectory of the COVID-19 outbreak. FiveThirtyEight also maintains a forecast tracker of a selection of individual models.