Deviation metric for epidemic duration in forecasts of several past influenza seasons.

<p>Dynamic (blue) and static (red) forecasts were considered here assuming the specific infectiousness profile function and scalar of 0.50 for pre-existing immunity. See legend of Fig. 4 for further details about x-axis. Deviation in epidemic duration was calculated as difference in peak week of simulated and observed epidemic. Positive values should be interpreted as overestimation, by the forecast model, of the observed epidemic duration. Negative values, similarly, indicated underestimation of the observed epidemic duration. Metric values closer to zero indicated better predictive ability of the forecasting methodology.