3 ms·

The IHME has been wildly wrong yet highly cited for over a year now. I've still got screencaps of their models that predict around 90,000 total deaths in the U

The IHME has been wildly wrong yet highly cited for over a year now. I've still got screencaps of their models that predict around 90,000 total deaths in the USA by the end of 2020. They were lifting a sigmoid curve off of China's numbers and applying it to the United States entirely blindly. It didn't even predict the shape of the decline off the first peak correctly since it was implicitly assuming the US would take similar steps to China (martial law) and drive the R0 down to 0.4 or so.

timr 6y ago
There has been a ton of terrible modeling this year, and the IHME is just one example. This week the CDC published an ensemble of models trained on Covid case data up to March 27. The models completely mispredict the actual number of cases since that time: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E0qZTvVVkAIs484?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E0qZTvVVkAIs484?format=jpg&name=... This is a total failure of validation that would make any other practitioner question the whole exercise, but it didn't stop the CDC from publishing them. Nor did it stop the news media from trumpeting the results. The Washington Post and CNBC and others wrote headline articles fawning over them.
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kens 6y ago
Yes, I don't understand why the IHME is still taken seriously after their awful models a year ago where they were repeatedly, confidently wrong. Link predicting deaths drop to 0 by June 21, 2020 (i.e. last year). Spoiler: they did not. https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/influential-ihme-model-projects-coronavirus-deaths-will-stop-after-june-21-but-experts-are-skeptical/ https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/influential-ihme-model-pro... The original paper https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.27.20043752v1.full-text https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.27.20043752v...

timr 6y ago

There has been a ton of terrible modeling this year, and the IHME is just one example. This week the CDC published an ensemble of models trained on Covid case data up to March 27. The models completely mispredict the actual number of cases since that time: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E0qZTvVVkAIs484?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E0qZTvVVkAIs484?format=jpg&name=... This is a total failure of validation that would make any other practitioner question the whole exercise, but it didn't stop the CDC from publishing them. Nor did it stop the news media from trumpeting the results. The Washington Post and CNBC and others wrote headline articles fawning over them.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

kens 6y ago

Yes, I don't understand why the IHME is still taken seriously after their awful models a year ago where they were repeatedly, confidently wrong. Link predicting deaths drop to 0 by June 21, 2020 (i.e. last year). Spoiler: they did not. https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/influential-ihme-model-projects-coronavirus-deaths-will-stop-after-june-21-but-experts-are-skeptical/ https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/influential-ihme-model-pro... The original paper https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.27.20043752v1.full-text https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.27.20043752v...