Forecasting training

How to answer questions about highly uncertain and complex events?

On this page, you can find information about the forecasting course. We give you the necessary information to do your forecasts, to understand how your performance is assessed and some clarifications regarding the questions.
You are expected to select 5 questions out of 8 and give at least 1 forecast for each of the selected every week until the end of the course if the question is not resolved before. If you select more than 5, only your 5 best results will be counted in the competition. You can forecast more than once a week, and all your forecasts will be counted in the final result.

Questions

We have 2 types of questions: yes/no and exact questions. In the first case the answer to the question is either yes, or no. In your answer, you should give the probability of a YES outcome (thus a NO answer would be a very low or 0 probability to YES). For an exact question, the answer is a real number. In most cases the outcome of the question will be obvious by reading major news sources. In some cases we indicated how the outcome will be judged.

  1. What will be the highest price in USD for 1 EUR according to the European Central Bank’s official exchange rate between 1 Sept and 31 Jan 2021? [resolved: 1.2338]
    The result can be seen on the official ECB page.
  2. What will be the highest number of officially reported daily COVID-19 cases in a single day in Hungary before 31 Jan 2021? [resolved: 6819]
    According to 'Our World in Data' the highest number of daily reported infections was on 29. Nov 2020 with 6819 cases..
  3. Will Joe Biden win the US presidential elections? [resolved: YES] Joe Biden did win the US elections.
    "Win" in this context means the majority of electoral college votes, winning only the popular vote is considered as a NO outcome.
  4. Will the US, the EU or any nation state impose sanctions on Russia or on Russian persons or organisations as a consequence of poisoning Alexei Navalny before 31 January 2021? [resolved: YES] The EU has introduced sanctions against 6 individuals and 1 entity on 15.10.2020.
  5. Will the Multiannual Financial Framework of the EU (MFF) be accepted until 31 Dec 2020? [resolved: YES] The MFF was accepted.
  6. Will the Chinese Chang’e 5 Lunar mission land physically intact on the surface of the Moon and send back data about its status until 31 Dec 2020? [resolved: YES] Chang'e-5 successfully landed on the moon.
  7. Will customs control be reintroduced on land between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland before 31 Jan? [resolved: NO] There will be no hard border on the Irish island.
  8. Will North Korea test a solid fuel ICBM before 31. Dec. 2020? [resolved: NO]

Do your forecast

Test/Control workshops - Budapest

In this table you can check which group you are in.

Training days for the TEST group will be on 31.10. - 01.11. 2020. (Sat, Sun) and on 14. 11. 2020. (Sat),
and on 13-14. 02. 2021. (Sat, Sun) and on 27. 02. 2021. (Sat) for the CONTROL group.

Test/Control workshops - Bruxelles

In this table you can check which group you are in.

Training days for the TEST group will be on 9.10. (Fri), 13.10.(Tue), 19.10. (Mon), 16.11. (Mon) between 18:30-21:30h online via Zoom, with some additional exercises to be done between the online meetings.

Training times for the CONTROL group will be announced later.

Performance assessment and Competition

Brier score

The Brier score is the squared error of a probabilistic forecast. To calculate it, we divide your forecast by 100 so that your probabilities range between 0 (0%) and 1 (100%). Then, we code reality as either 0 (if the event did not happen) or 1 (if the event did happen). For each answer option, we take the difference between your forecast and the correct answer, square the differences, and add them all together.
For a yes/no question where you forecasted 70% and the event happened, your score would be (1 – 0.7)2 + (0 – 0.3)2 = 0.18.
For an exact question where the outcome was 347 and your forecast was 339, your score woud be (347 - 339)2 = 64.
The best possible Brier score is 0, for yes/no questions the worst possible score is 2.

Accuracy score

The accuracy score shows your performance compared to the group. The accuracy score is your Brier score divided by the group average Brier score. Lower scores are better.

Competition

During this course there is a competition both in the TEST and in the CONTROL groups. We will calculate the accuracy score for each student in each selected question. Based on the accuracy scores, we will rank students (for each question), and the winner will be the one with the lowest average rank. Each student has to choose at least 5 questions to forecast, but if someone chooses more than that, only the 5 best accuracy scores will be counted in the competition.