Baseline nowcasting methods for handling delays in epidemiological data

Up-to-date real-time disease surveillance data can provide critical public health insights, however reporting delays can create downward bias in the latest data. Nowcasting methods designed to correct for this bias remain underused in public health practice due to their complexity, lack of tailored documentation, or technical barriers. Methodological advances in nowcasting are also hampered by the absence of standardised benchmarks for evaluating new methods.

To address these needs, we developed a family of nowcasting methods and an accompanying R package, baselinenowcast. We validated our method against the baseline method that was used in the German COVID-19 Nowcast Hub and on which our approach was based. Using this data, we conducted an analysis to compare different specifications of our method which were designed to address common issues in epidemiology such as weekday patterns in reporting and the ability to share estimates across different strata. We used our approach on norovirus surveillance data from the United Kingdom Health Security Agency (UKHSA) and compared the performance of three of our method specifications against three methods evaluated in a previous study.

Our baseline method improved estimates compared to unadjusted data across all case studies. We found that the optimal choice of baseline method specification depends on context but that our default method specification performed well in a range of settings. Applied to UKHSA norovirus data, our method helped us understand the performance of the model currently used in public health practice.

Our method and software can be used both as a straightforward nowcasting method and provides a benchmark for nowcasting model development.