Alden Jefferson Green

All Publications

• Evaluation of individual and ensemble probabilistic forecasts of COVID-19 mortality in the United States. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Cramer, E. Y., Ray, E. L., Lopez, V. K., Bracher, J., Brennen, A., Castro Rivadeneira, A. J., Gerding, A., Gneiting, T., House, K. H., Huang, Y., Jayawardena, D., Kanji, A. H., Khandelwal, A., Le, K., Mühlemann, A., Niemi, J., Shah, A., Stark, A., Wang, Y., Wattanachit, N., Zorn, M. W., Gu, Y., Jain, S., Bannur, N., Deva, A., Kulkarni, M., Merugu, S., Raval, A., Shingi, S., Tiwari, A., White, J., Abernethy, N. F., Woody, S., Dahan, M., Fox, S., Gaither, K., Lachmann, M., Meyers, L. A., Scott, J. G., Tec, M., Srivastava, A., George, G. E., Cegan, J. C., Dettwiller, I. D., England, W. P., Farthing, M. W., Hunter, R. H., Lafferty, B., Linkov, I., Mayo, M. L., Parno, M. D., Rowland, M. A., Trump, B. D., Zhang-James, Y., Chen, S., Faraone, S. V., Hess, J., Morley, C. P., Salekin, A., Wang, D., Corsetti, S. M., Baer, T. M., Eisenberg, M. C., Falb, K., Huang, Y., Martin, E. T., McCauley, E., Myers, R. L., Schwarz, T., Sheldon, D., Gibson, G. C., Yu, R., Gao, L., Ma, Y., Wu, D., Yan, X., Jin, X., Wang, Y. X., Chen, Y., Guo, L., Zhao, Y., Gu, Q., Chen, J., Wang, L., Xu, P., Zhang, W., Zou, D., Biegel, H., Lega, J., McConnell, S., Nagraj, V. P., Guertin, S. L., Hulme-Lowe, C., Turner, S. D., Shi, Y., Ban, X., Walraven, R., Hong, Q. J., Kong, S., van de Walle, A., Turtle, J. A., Ben-Nun, M., Riley, S., Riley, P., Koyluoglu, U., DesRoches, D., Forli, P., Hamory, B., Kyriakides, C., Leis, H., Milliken, J., Moloney, M., Morgan, J., Nirgudkar, N., Ozcan, G., Piwonka, N., Ravi, M., Schrader, C., Shakhnovich, E., Siegel, D., Spatz, R., Stiefeling, C., Wilkinson, B., Wong, A., Cavany, S., España, G., Moore, S., Oidtman, R., Perkins, A., Kraus, D., Kraus, A., Gao, Z., Bian, J., Cao, W., Lavista Ferres, J., Li, C., Liu, T. Y., Xie, X., Zhang, S., Zheng, S., Vespignani, A., Chinazzi, M., Davis, J. T., Mu, K., Pastore Y Piontti, A., Xiong, X., Zheng, A., Baek, J., Farias, V., Georgescu, A., Levi, R., Sinha, D., Wilde, J., Perakis, G., Bennouna, M. A., Nze-Ndong, D., Singhvi, D., Spantidakis, I., Thayaparan, L., Tsiourvas, A., Sarker, A., Jadbabaie, A., Shah, D., Della Penna, N., Celi, L. A., Sundar, S., Wolfinger, R., Osthus, D., Castro, L., Fairchild, G., Michaud, I., Karlen, D., Kinsey, M., Mullany, L. C., Rainwater-Lovett, K., Shin, L., Tallaksen, K., Wilson, S., Lee, E. C., Dent, J., Grantz, K. H., Hill, A. L., Kaminsky, J., Kaminsky, K., Keegan, L. T., Lauer, S. A., Lemaitre, J. C., Lessler, J., Meredith, H. R., Perez-Saez, J., Shah, S., Smith, C. P., Truelove, S. A., Wills, J., Marshall, M., Gardner, L., Nixon, K., Burant, J. C., Wang, L., Gao, L., Gu, Z., Kim, M., Li, X., Wang, G., Wang, Y., Yu, S., Reiner, R. C., Barber, R., Gakidou, E., Hay, S. I., Lim, S., Murray, C., Pigott, D., Gurung, H. L., Baccam, P., Stage, S. A., Suchoski, B. T., Prakash, B. A., Adhikari, B., Cui, J., Rodríguez, A., Tabassum, A., Xie, J., Keskinocak, P., Asplund, J., Baxter, A., Oruc, B. E., Serban, N., Arik, S. O., Dusenberry, M., Epshteyn, A., Kanal, E., Le, L. T., Li, C. L., Pfister, T., Sava, D., Sinha, R., Tsai, T., Yoder, N., Yoon, J., Zhang, L., Abbott, S., Bosse, N. I., Funk, S., Hellewell, J., Meakin, S. R., Sherratt, K., Zhou, M., Kalantari, R., Yamana, T. K., Pei, S., Shaman, J., Li, M. L., Bertsimas, D., Skali Lami, O., Soni, S., Tazi Bouardi, H., Ayer, T., Adee, M., Chhatwal, J., Dalgic, O. O., Ladd, M. A., Linas, B. P., Mueller, P., Xiao, J., Wang, Y., Wang, Q., Xie, S., Zeng, D., Green, A., Bien, J., Brooks, L., Hu, A. J., Jahja, M., McDonald, D., Narasimhan, B., Politsch, C., Rajanala, S., Rumack, A., Simon, N., Tibshirani, R. J., Tibshirani, R., Ventura, V., Wasserman, L., O'Dea, E. B., Drake, J. M., Pagano, R., Tran, Q. T., Ho, L. S., Huynh, H., Walker, J. W., Slayton, R. B., Johansson, M. A., Biggerstaff, M., Reich, N. G. 2022; 119 (15): e2113561119

  Abstract

  SignificanceThis paper compares the probabilistic accuracy of short-term forecasts of reported deaths due to COVID-19 during the first year and a half of the pandemic in the United States. Results show high variation in accuracy between and within stand-alone models and more consistent accuracy from an ensemble model that combined forecasts from all eligible models. This demonstrates that an ensemble model provided a reliable and comparatively accurate means of forecasting deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic that exceeded the performance of all of the models that contributed to it. This work strengthens the evidence base for synthesizing multiple models to support public-health action.

  View details for DOI 10.1073/pnas.2113561119

  View details for PubMedID 35394862

• Can auxiliary indicators improve COVID-19 forecasting and hotspot prediction? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America McDonald, D. J., Bien, J., Green, A., Hu, A. J., DeFries, N., Hyun, S., Oliveira, N. L., Sharpnack, J., Tang, J., Tibshirani, R., Ventura, V., Wasserman, L., Tibshirani, R. J. 1800; 118 (51)

  Abstract

  Short-term forecasts of traditional streams from public health reporting (such as cases, hospitalizations, and deaths) are a key input to public health decision-making during a pandemic. Since early 2020, our research group has worked with data partners to collect, curate, and make publicly available numerous real-time COVID-19 indicators, providing multiple views of pandemic activity in the United States. This paper studies the utility of five such indicators-derived from deidentified medical insurance claims, self-reported symptoms from online surveys, and COVID-related Google search activity-from a forecasting perspective. For each indicator, we ask whether its inclusion in an autoregressive (AR) model leads to improved predictive accuracy relative to the same model excluding it. Such an AR model, without external features, is already competitive with many top COVID-19 forecasting models in use today. Our analysis reveals that 1) inclusion of each of these five indicators improves on the overall predictive accuracy of the AR model; 2) predictive gains are in general most pronounced during times in which COVID cases are trending in "flat" or "down" directions; and 3) one indicator, based on Google searches, seems to be particularly helpful during "up" trends.

  View details for DOI 10.1073/pnas.2111453118

  View details for PubMedID 34903655

• An open repository of real-time COVID-19 indicators. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Reinhart, A., Brooks, L., Jahja, M., Rumack, A., Tang, J., Agrawal, S., Al Saeed, W., Arnold, T., Basu, A., Bien, J., Cabrera, Á. A., Chin, A., Chua, E. J., Clark, B., Colquhoun, S., DeFries, N., Farrow, D. C., Forlizzi, J., Grabman, J., Gratzl, S., Green, A., Haff, G., Han, R., Harwood, K., Hu, A. J., Hyde, R., Hyun, S., Joshi, A., Kim, J., Kuznetsov, A., La Motte-Kerr, W., Lee, Y. J., Lee, K., Lipton, Z. C., Liu, M. X., Mackey, L., Mazaitis, K., McDonald, D. J., McGuinness, P., Narasimhan, B., O'Brien, M. P., Oliveira, N. L., Patil, P., Perer, A., Politsch, C. A., Rajanala, S., Rucker, D., Scott, C., Shah, N. H., Shankar, V., Sharpnack, J., Shemetov, D., Simon, N., Smith, B. Y., Srivastava, V., Tan, S., Tibshirani, R., Tuzhilina, E., Van Nortwick, A. K., Ventura, V., Wasserman, L., Weaver, B., Weiss, J. C., Whitman, S., Williams, K., Rosenfeld, R., Tibshirani, R. J. 2021; 118 (51)

  Abstract

  The COVID-19 pandemic presented enormous data challenges in the United States. Policy makers, epidemiological modelers, and health researchers all require up-to-date data on the pandemic and relevant public behavior, ideally at fine spatial and temporal resolution. The COVIDcast API is our attempt to fill this need: Operational since April 2020, it provides open access to both traditional public health surveillance signals (cases, deaths, and hospitalizations) and many auxiliary indicators of COVID-19 activity, such as signals extracted from deidentified medical claims data, massive online surveys, cell phone mobility data, and internet search trends. These are available at a fine geographic resolution (mostly at the county level) and are updated daily. The COVIDcast API also tracks all revisions to historical data, allowing modelers to account for the frequent revisions and backfill that are common for many public health data sources. All of the data are available in a common format through the API and accompanying R and Python software packages. This paper describes the data sources and signals, and provides examples demonstrating that the auxiliary signals in the COVIDcast API present information relevant to tracking COVID activity, augmenting traditional public health reporting and empowering research and decision-making.

  View details for DOI 10.1073/pnas.2111452118

  View details for PubMedID 34903654