June 13, 2023: Congratulations to our top prize winner, Sergio, and thank you to all who participated! Read more about the conclusion of the tournament in this discussion post.

Every year in the US, influenza causes hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and tens of thousands of deaths, but the timing and magnitude of the flu season varies, making it difficult to prepare for its impact. FluSight Challenge 2022/23 is Metaculus’s second annual tournament contributing forecasts to the yearly FluSight forecasting efforts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Since 2013, the CDC’s yearly competition has engaged academic and private industry forecasting teams to submit weekly predictions supporting more effective public health responses. Flu forecasts by Metaculus and other forecasting teams can be invaluable to healthcare providers, and inform

• Flu vaccination and antiviral treatment timing

• Hospital preparation for large influxes of patients

• Community mitigation strategies

• The distribution of healthcare staff and resources

Metaculus is proud to again contribute predictions to the CDC FluSight Challenge while strengthening ongoing collaborations with computational scientist Thomas McAndrew, who leads Lehigh University’s Computational Uncertainty Lab, and biostatistician Evan Ray, who develops infectious disease forecasting models at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. For FluSight 2022/23, Metaculus is also collaborating with Georgia Institute of Technology biomedical engineer and lecturer Todd Fernandez.

A $5,000 prize pool will be awarded after the challenge concludes in May of 2023.

Note: In addition to the public tournament, Metaculus is also conducting a private FluSight initiative that collects predictions by a team of epidemiologists, computer scientists, and bio statisticians.

Thomas McAndrew is a computational scientist and leads Lehigh University's Computational Uncertainty Lab. He works at the intersection of biostatistics and data science, studying ensemble models, expert-prediction, and crowdsourcing for forecasting infectious diseases.

Evan Ray is a Research Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research centers on developing methods for forecasting infectious diseases including dengue fever, influenza, and COVID-19.

Todd Fernandez is a qualitative and quantitative engineer and lecturer at Georgia Tech in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.