New Platform to Crowdsource Experts' Forecasts on COVID-19 Pandemic

By Adam Siegel on April 22, 2020

Partnership by Cultivate Labs and Good Judgment Inc will aggregate forecasts from experts to better understand the implications of the COVID-19 crisis and share the results with decision makers.

Cultivate Labs and Good Judgment Inc have created a crowd forecasting platform for experts to collect and aggregate probabilistic estimates about COVID-19-related trends and developments. The forecasting outputs will inform government agencies, NGOs, and companies making decisions in this time of crisis and uncertainty.

The Covid Impacts platform is currently eliciting forecasts on trends and events in the United States including the timeline of medical interventions and vaccine developments; the ability for states to meet various healthcare response metrics; and local, regional, and national infection milestones. Covid Impacts is largely focused on 3-18 month forecast timelines, and forecast questions will be judged with open data sources available to the public.

"We’re launching Covid Impacts because we didn’t see any other large-scale, multi-disciplinary crowd forecasting approaches designed for experts out there," Adam Siegel, CEO of Cultivate Labs said. "If you can get a diverse, informed group of people to participate, this type of approach tends to be less biased and more accurate than other forms of forecasting, especially given the unique challenges decision makers are facing."

With crowd forecasting, participants provide numerical probabilistic forecasts and rationales, and are able to see how their judgments compare to those of the "crowd." Unlike a one-time survey, participants can update their forecasts at any time before questions are judged, giving them an ability to react to "ground truth" as it happens, and arming decision makers with context and visibility they never would have had otherwise.

"Crowd forecasting is complementary to other data collection tools and can be especially valuable when circumstances are unreliable or too complex to model," Warren Hatch, CEO of Good Judgment Inc said. "Starting with our research for the U.S. Intelligence Community, then subsequently running GJ Open, the large open public forecasting tournament, and our Superforecaster service, we’ve learned just how valuable (and accurate) it can be to capture collective human judgment."

Covid Impacts is recruiting epidemiologists, public health professionals, doctors, pharmacologists, data scientists, policymakers, and others who can make informed judgments on the impacts of COVID-19. Interested participants can apply at https://covidimpacts.com.

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Cultivate Labs has over a decade of experience guiding crowdsourced forecasting efforts for governments, research institutions, and private sector organizations around the world. Its technology platform, Cultivate Forecasts, has processed over 10M forecasts for organizations such as AbbVie, General Electric, LG, and the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Good Judgment Inc is the world’s most accurate forecasting entity that emerged from a four-year U.S. Government research project led by Professor Philip Tetlock at the University of Pennsylvania. The firm has a network of Superforecasters to engage in client questions, provides online and in-person training, and works with organizations in the public and private sectors to improve forecasting in their own decision-making processes.