Preparing your submission

This is an adapted version of materials provided by the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub under the MIT license.

This page is intended to provide teams with all the information they need to submit forecasts.

How to move files to the repository?

For technical reasons, submission by external contributors will not be done by direct upload/push to the repository. Instead, teams are asked to create a fork and submit files via a pull request. This will also trigger our validation scripts to check the data format. We provide a step-by-step explanation on how to do this using only the user interface of the GitHub website and a shorter explanation for more experienced GitHub users.

Where to store forecasts?

Forecasts submitted directly by teams need to go to the data-processed/ folder. For each combination of team and model (teams can in principle submit forecasts from several models), a subdirectory of the form

team-model

has to be created, where

• team is the teamname and
• model is the name of your model.

Both team and model should be less than 15 characters and not include hyphens.

Which files to submit?

Submissions of teams comprise several types of files. As an example you may consider the existing subfolder data-processed/LANL-GrowthRate.

Metadata

Participating teams must provide a metadata file (see template or this example), including methodological detail about their approach.

The metadata file should follow the naming convention

metadata-team-model.txt

License (optional)

We encourage you to include a license file, please use the following format

LICENSE-team.txt

Links to some commonly used licenses can be found here.

Forecast files

Forecast files contain forecasts in a standard long format described in a separate entry. As an example consider this template or the existing forecast files in data-processed. Each such file should be named using the following convention:

• YYYY-MM-DD-Germany-team-model.csv for death forecasts (these used to be the only type covered by our platform)
• YYYY-MM-DD-Germany-team-model-ICU.csv for ICU forecasts
• YYYY-MM-DD-Germany-team-model-case.csv for case forecasts

where

• YYYY is the 4 digit year,
• MM is the 2 digit month,
• DD is the 2 digit day,
• team is the teamname, and
• model is the name of your model.

The date YYYY-MM-DD is the date the forecasts were made from your model, i.e. the most recent data is YYYY-MM-DD.

The team and model in this file must match the team and model in the directory this file is in. Both team and model should no longer than 15 characters, alpha-numeric and underscores only, with no spaces or hyphens.

Checks performed upon submission

Our system will perform a set of automated checks to make sure submissions correspond to the formatting rules. These are described in a separate entry, see also the instructions on how to perform checks locally prior to submission.