Models behaving badly: understanding the poor performance of Covid-19 projections

Passengers queue to get their documents verified before entering the IGI Airport amid the lockdown on May 25, 2020 in New Delhi.

Synopsis

When the novel coronavirus affected human societies, many experts created projections of how the disease would spread. Most of these efforts now appear fairly poor. Understanding why they did not capture the reality is a useful step in doing a better job during such events in future.

Over the last three months, the novel coronavirus (nCoV) causing the Covid-19 infection has captured headlines and mindshare. Many of us are wondering when the virus will peak and end so that we can resume our normal lives. However, for now, there are far too many questions, but few answers. We live in the age of data, with analytics and artificial intelligence predicting our actions even before we know it. Then, why are not data scientists and

May 27, 2020, 12:55 AM IST