Nirupama Tamvada - Producing Automated Short-Term Forecasts of Viral Respiratory Diseases based on a Renewal Equation Approach with the vrifprecasting R package

Producing short-term forecasts of cases of viral respiratory infections (VRIs) is crucial to gain situational awareness of the short-term changes in viral activity and support public health management. A widely used measure to simulate the number of new disease cases is the time-dependent instantaneous reproduction number, Rt, which can be estimated by a renewal equation model . However, daily data in periods of low case counts is often noisy, which leads to inaccurate forecasts. To this end, we augment the model with a smoothing model to increase the accuracy of the estimated forecasts. We incorporate this method in the vriforecasting R package. The end user can easily generate a customizable report of high-quality projections of any infectious VRI of interest along with forecast validation metrics on historical data.

Mediasite Presenter

10/29/2024 5:50:00 PM