Trainings

The following trainings and courses on forecasting/modeling use hubverse data standards and software:

Nowcasting and Forecasting Infectious Disease Dynamics (NFIDD) training course

The NFIDD training course offers sessions aimed at teaching real-time analysis methods for infectious disease surveillance data and is intended for epidemiologists, public health professionals, and researchers.

The sessions cover topics such as:

• Delay distributions and biases
• Using delay distributions to model the data generating process
• Estimation of reproduction number (Rₜ) via the renewal equation
• Nowcasting concepts and nowcasting an unknown reporting delay
• Forecasting concepts and improving forecasting models
• Forecast evaluation and ensembling
• Evaluation of real-world outbreak forecasts
• Combining nowcasting and forecasting.

Notably, the training also offers a local hub playground session that guides participants through setting up and using a local forecast hub in a “sandbox” environment in order to build, test, and compare infectious disease forecast models, which serves to put into practice many of the earlier lessons.

AMPH Forecast Suite

The AMPH Forecast Suite is an R package developed by the Atlantic Coast Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics and Analytics (ACCIDDA) that offers a complete toolkit for building infectious disease forecasting pipelines and hubs. It streamlines the process of working with multiple forecasting packages, including Hubverse packages, by:

• Installing and managing dependencies for essential forecasting packages
• Establishing an appropriate directory structure
• Retrieving and preparing data for use in forecasting models
• Offering helper functions to translate data across different package formats
• Running forecasts and nowcasts using multiple packages
• Ensembling, visualizing, and evaluating forecast results
• Generating outputs compatible with forecast hubs and evaluation tools