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Forecast submission instructions

This page is intended to provide teams with all the information they need to submit forecasts.

Update: All forecasts should be emailed to [email protected].

These instructions provide detail about the data format as well as validation that you can do prior to this pull request. In addition, we describe metadata that each model should provide either through email or submitted in a pull request to data-forecasts/.

See the guidelines and data-surveillance/ folder for the ESSENCE CLI case definition and an example data file.

Table of Contents

Data formatting

Forecast files submitted to this collaboration should adhere to the below formatting instructions
to ensure the file can be used in the visualization and ensemble forecasting.

Subdirectory

Each subdirectory within the data-forecasts/ directory has the format

team-model

where

  • team is the name of your team and
  • model is the name of your model.

Both team and model should be less than 15 characters and not include hyphens. The model should be unique from any other model in the project.

Within each subdirectory, there should be a metadata file, a license file (optional), and a set of forecasts.

Metadata

The metadata file should have the following format

metadata-team-model.txt

and here is the structure of the metadata file.

License (optional)

By default, forecasts are released under a CC-BY 4.0 license. If you would like to release your forecasts under a different license, please specify a standard license in the license field of your metadata file. Alternatively, if you wish to use a license that is not in the list of standard licenses, you may include a

LICENSE.txt

file in your model directory.

Forecasts

Each forecast file should have the following format

YYYY-MM-DD-team-model.csv

where

  • YYYY is the 4 digit year,
  • MM is the 2 digit month,
  • DD is the 2 digit day,
  • team is the name of your team, and
  • model is the name of your model.

The date YYYY-MM-DD is the forecast_date. For this project, the forecast_date should always be the date that the submission is due.

The team and model in this file must match the team and model in the directory this file is in. Both team and model should be less than 15 characters, alpha-numeric and underscores only, with no spaces or hyphens.

Forecast file format

The file must be a comma-separated value (csv) file with the following columns (in any order):

  • forecast_date
  • target
  • target_end_date
  • location
  • type
  • quantile
  • value

No additional columns are allowed.

Each row in the file is a single quantile forecast for a specific location. See the template for an example.

forecast_date

Values in the forecast_date column must be a date in the format

YYYY-MM-DD

This is the date on which the forecasts were due to be submitted. Note that all due dates fall on Wednesdays. forecast_date should correspond and be redundant with the date in the filename, and is included here for internal completeness.

target

Values in the target column must be the following character (string):

 "N wk ahead CLI pct" where N is a number between 1 and 4

target_end_date

Values in the target_end_date column should be the date in the format

YYYY-MM-DD

This is the date corresponding to the Saturday of the MMWR week of the forecasted value.

location

Values in the location column consist of the MHS market name. Name should appear exactly how it appears according to the guidelines Table A.2. column MARKET NAME (For Files). The required location name format can also be found in the location file.

(Examples: National_Capital_Region, Lejeune_Cherry_Point)

type

Values in the type column should all be either the character string "point" or "quantile".

quantile

Values are either "NA" if type="point", or a quantile in the format 0.### if type="quantile".

This value indicates the quantile for the value in this row.

Teams must provide the following 23 quantiles:

c(0.01, 0.025, seq(0.05, 0.95, by = 0.05), 0.975, 0.99)

##  [1] 0.010 0.025 0.050 0.100 0.150 0.200 0.250 0.300 0.350 0.400 0.450 0.500
## [13] 0.550 0.600 0.650 0.700 0.750 0.800 0.850 0.900 0.950 0.975 0.990

value

Values in the value column are non-negative real numbers indicating the "point" or "quantile" prediction for this row.

Making a submission

Initial submission

Contact [email protected] to submit your initial forecast file submission. Metadata and optional license files can be emailed directly or added to this repository using a pull request (see instructions below).

To prepare for the initial submission, fork this repository and clone it to your computer/work station/etc. In the forked repository you created, make a subdirectory for your team in the data-forecasts/ folder following the subdirectory naming convention. This is where you will place all your metadata, and optional license files.

Use a pull request to create your submission. Open a pull request from your forked repository to the original repo. This will initiate merging your changes into the main repo. With the pull request, automatic validation checks on file format and content are run. More information on making a pull request can be found here.

When a pull request is open, you can add/modify files in the pull request by pushing changes from your forked repo. This will allow you to address any problems found during the validation checks. Automatic checks run after each push so you can check if you were able to resolve the problems listed.

Common reasons for a failed pull request: Excel changing the date format upon saving the .csv, misspelled column headers or keys in the metadata While pull requests through this repository will not be required for this collaboration, ensuring that these formatting features are correct will aid in forecast interpretation and ensembling.

Pull requests including metadata or license files will be merged as submitted. However, forecast files should be emailed directly to [email protected].

Forecast validation

To ensure proper data formatting, automatic validations are run on all pull requests to data-forecasts/.

Pull request forecast validation

When a pull request is submitted, the data are validated through Github Actions which runs the tests present in the validations repository. The intent for these tests are to validate the requirements above. Due to differences between the DOD-CLI forecasting collaboration and other forecasting challenges, forecast files for this collaboration will now be submitted by email [email protected]. Questions and concerns can also be emailed directly.

Policy on late or updated submissions

In order to ensure that forecasting is done in real-time, all forecasts are requested to be emailed by the listed deadlines.