publications, research

New paper in BMC Medicine on the validation of GLEAM's real-time predictions for H1N1pdm Dec. 14, 2012

We recenlty published a paper which presents a thorough validation and assessment of the results obtained using GLEAM during the course of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.

The manuscript appears on the latest issue of BMC Medicine: 

Real-time numerical forecast of global epidemic spreading: case study of 2009 A/H1N1pdm
Michele Tizzoni, Paolo Bajardi, Chiara Poletto, José J. Ramasco, Duygu Balcan, Bruno Gonçalves, Nicola Perra, Vittoria Colizza, Alessandro Vespignani.
BMC Medicine, 10:165 (2012).

In 2009 we used GLEAM in real-time to generate stochastic simulations of the global spread of the H1N1 pandemic and provide forecasts for the activity peaks in the northern hemisphere in the fall/winter wave.

Those forecasts were published in September 2009, well before the peak weeks of epidemic activity in the northern hemisphere. In this paper, we have validated those results against the real-life surveillance data collected in 48 countries, and found that our predictions were in good agreement with the empirical data.

For more details about the published results, take a look at this post on the official website of the GLEAM project.

Statistical association between the predicted and observed activity peaks. Peak week as simulated by the model in the baseline stochastic forecast output (SFO) set versus the peak week observed by surveillance systems. The reference ranges of the simulated peak week were obtained by the analysis of 2,000 stochastic realizations of the model. In the inset, we show the box plot indicating the distribution of the differences between the simulated peak week and the observed peak week.