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Table 3 Short-term forecasting performance in the context of the plague outbreak in Madagascar. Although the sub-epidemic model consistently outperformed the simpler models in terms of the quality of fit to the plague outbreak, the sub-epidemic model did not always outperform the Richards model based on all performance metrics in short-term forecasts. Values highlighted in italics correspond to the best performance metric at a given forecasting horizon

From: A novel sub-epidemic modeling framework for short-term forecasting epidemic waves

Model

Mean absolute error (MAE)

Mean squared error (MSE)

Mean interval score (MIS)

Percentage coverage of the 95% prediction interval

2 weeks ahead

 Sub-epidemic wave

11.3

216.8

64.4

86

 Richards

13.2

275.0

101.3

76

 Logistic

27.9

878.1

714.0

14

3 weeks ahead

 Sub-epidemic wave

12.8

353.5

90.4

86.7

 Richards

14.9

392.0

112.0

74.7

 Logistic

29.7

1003.0

792.0

12.0

4 weeks ahead

 Sub-epidemic wave

14.4

549.7

115.9

85.0

 Richards

16.4

508.0

137.9

70.0

 Logistic

31.3

1112.4

862.2

11.0

5 weeks ahead

 Sub-epidemic wave

16.3

878.5

138.8

85.6

 Richards

17.5

624.6

164.6

65.6

 Logistic

32.3

1197.0

919.1

10.4