Scope

Several of the groups that have worked on supporting and developing the modeling hubs came together in 2022 to initiate a community-driven effort to generalize hub-related tools that were developed “on the go” during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The goal of the Consortium of Infectious Disease Modeling Hubs is to develop a central open-source suite of tools for creating, hosting, maintaining, and running a modeling hub. As mentioned previously, while the focus of the motivating applications were related to predictive time-series-style modeling of outbreaks, the tools developed as part of this effort are designed to be more general and could be used for other purposes, e.g., for aggregating estimates of parameters of interest.

The ultimate goal of this project is to provide a suite of portable and open-source resources that could be relatively easily adapted by new modeling hubs without the need to duplicate efforts.

Initial work will focus on

• Developing a standardized and configurable set-up for a data repository

• Developing software packages that can perform essential functionality for hubs, such as

  • File structure/characteristic/content validation

  • Data format validation

  • Loading data

  • Plotting data

  • Creating aggregate/ensemble estimates

  • Evaluating nowcast/forecast data

• Developing software for a hub “Dashboard” or visualization