{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/back2future-leveraging-backfill-dynamics-for","title":"Back2Future: Leveraging Backfill Dynamics for Improving Real-time Predictions in Future","arxiv_id":"2106.04420","date":"2021-06-08","proceeding":"ICLR 2022 4","authors":["Harshavardhan Kamarthi","Alexander Rodríguez","B. Aditya Prakash"],"abstract":"In real-time forecasting in public health, data collection is a non-trivial and demanding task. Often after initially released, it undergoes several revisions later (maybe due to human or technical constraints) - as a result, it may take weeks until the data reaches to a stable value. This so-called 'backfill' phenomenon and its effect on model performance has been barely studied in the prior literature. In this paper, we introduce the multi-variate backfill problem using COVID-19 as the motivating example. We construct a detailed dataset composed of relevant signals over the past year of the pandemic. We then systematically characterize several patterns in backfill dynamics and leverage our observations for formulating a novel problem and neural framework Back2Future that aims to refines a given model's predictions in real-time. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our method refines the performance of top models for COVID-19 forecasting, in contrast to non-trivial baselines, yielding 18% improvement over baselines, enabling us obtain a new SOTA performance. In addition, we show that our model improves model evaluation too; hence policy-makers can better understand the true accuracy of forecasting models in real-time.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.04420v8","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.04420v8.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"back2future-leveraging-backfill-dynamics-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/AdityaLab/Back2Future","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2106.04420","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2106.04420"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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