The final SciCast annual report has been released! See the “About” or “Project Data” menus above, or go directly to the SciCast Final Report download page.
SciCast has seen over 11,000 registrations, and over 129,000 forecasts. Google Analytics reports over 76K unique IP addresses (suggesting 8 per registered user), and 1.3M pageviews. The average session duration was 5 minutes.
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The SciCast 2015 Annual Report has been approved for public release. The report focuses on Y4 activities, but also includes a complete publication and presentation list for all four years. Please click “Download SciCast Final Report” to get the PDF. You may also be interested in the SciCast anonymized dataset.
Here are two paragraphs from the Executive Summary:
We report on the fourth and final year of a large project at George Mason University developing and testing combinatorial prediction markets for aggregating expertise. For the first two years, we developed and ran the DAGGRE project on geopolitical forecasting. On May 26, 2013, renamed ourselves SciCast, engaged Inkling Markets to redesign our website front-end and handle both outreach and question management, re-engineered the system architecture and refactored key methods to scale up by 10x – 100x, engaged Tuuyi to develop a recommender service to guide people through the large number of questions, and pursued several engineering and algorithm improvements including smaller and faster asset data structures, backup approximate inference, and an arc-pricing model and dynamic junction-tree recompilation that allowed users to create their own arcs. Inkling built a crowdsourced question writing platform called Spark. The SciCast public site (scicast.org) launched on November 30, 2013, and began substantial recruiting in early January, 2014.
As of May 22, 2015, SciCast has published 1,275 valid questions and created 494 links among 655 questions. Of these, 624 questions are open now, of which 344 are linked (see Figure 1). SciCast has an average Brier score of 0.267 overall (0.240 on binary questions), beating the uniform distribution 85% of the time, by about 48%. It is also 18-23% more accurate than the available baseline: an unweighted average of its own “Safe Mode” estimates, even though those estimates are informed by the market. It beats that ULinOP about 7/10 times.
You are welcome to cite this annual report. Please also cite our Collective Intelligence 2014 paper and/or our International Journal of Forecasting 2015 paper (if it gets published — under review now).
Sincerely,
Charles Twardy and the SciCast team
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We’re thrilled to announce that everyone who participated in the accuracy contest will receive an invitation to be a guest star on Survivor: Future! Can you outwit the other castaways with your prediction power?
The SciCast Accuracy Incentives contest has come to an end. The final accuracy leaderboard will be selected at a random time in the next few weeks. This will allow more questions to resolve as well as randomize the selection time to reduce the impact of attempts to inflate scores on unresolved contest questions.
Read more about the contest.
On February 12, 2015 we are adding additional questions to the final round for the accuracy contest. Forecasts on these questions – through March 6, 2015 – have their market scores calculated and added to a person’s “portfolio.” The best portfolios at a time shortly after March 7, 2015, will win big prizes.
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Today we disabled 7 accounts for blatant gaming behavior, particularly this time for dumping points from a shill account to a main account. When accounts are disabled, the account owners receive an email, if they have provided a valid email address. Otherwise they will see a note when they try to log in. We will not name the accounts until the owners have had a chance to respond to us. Continue reading
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Because SciCast strives for continual improvement and also needs even more participants and forecasts than in previous years, we have been exploring the effectiveness of incentives, particularly monetary incentives, for increasing the quality of participation in a prediction market. This post is the first of a five-part series to summarize the first two incentives studies as we start a third. (Parts of this series of posts are based on previous technical reports unavailable to the public.) This first post lays out the goals, hypotheses, and background of the incentives studies. If you’ve been participating in SciCast for a while, you might better understand some of your own experiences after reading this. Continue reading
Congratulations to forecasters from the past several weeks who won profile badges on SciCast.org during Activity Badge Wednesday. Learn more about the special.
The following people won Amazon gift cards for activity on SciCast.org during Activity Reward Tuesday over the past four weeks. A belated congratulations to all of our winners! Learn more about the special.
For the final lotteries following August 15th, 2014, each Entrant’s values will be averaged over a series of randomly selected times as early as August 16th at 12:00 AM ET, and no later than September 1st at 12:00 AM ET. Learn more.