This is the data repository for the 2024 CDPH West Nile virus Forecasting Challenge. This is an open (by request) forecasting challenge to predict monthly West Nile virus (WNV) total disease cases in select California counties in 2024 in the months of May through December. This is the first iteration of a California county-specific Forecasting Challenge.
If sufficient forecasts are available, forecast summary reports will be released monthly when possible through the challenge and will be available in this repository. These reports aggregate submissions from modeling teams, a forecast ensemble developed from individual model submissions, 10-year historical medians, and other baseline models. All forecasts are provided at the county-month level through the end of the year and predict total reported cases of West Nile virus disease.
Our challenge focuses on predicting monthly counts of reported WNV cases in the following California counties: Fresno, Kern, Los Angeles, Merced, Orange, Placer, Riverside, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Joaquin, Solano, Stanislaus, Tulare. The submission format is described in our model-ouput section.
Dates: The Challenge Period will begin April 2024 and will run until October 2024. Participants are currently asked to submit forecasts by: April 30th, May 31, June 30, July 31, August 31, September 30, and October 31 (herein referred to as the Forecast Due Dates). All submissions should include forecasts for all remaining months of 2024 (through December).
Prediction Targets: Participating teams are asked to provide county-level predictions for targets WNV cases per million inhabitants. Teams will submit their bin-based probability estimates for the month ending on the reference date. All forecasts are provided at the county-month level through the end of the year and predict total reported cases of West Nile virus disease. If you have questions about this target, please reach out to the organizers at modeling@cdph.ca.gov.
We are grateful to the teams who have generated forecasts and made their forecast data publicly available under different terms and licenses. By default, forecasts are available under the CC-BY 4.0 license, although teams may specify release under a different license in their metadata. You will find the licenses (when provided) within the metadata contained within model-specific folders in the data-forecasts directory. Please consult these licenses before using these data to ensure that you follow the terms under which these data were released.
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.