Table 4

Hits and False alarms in forecast models

Illustration of the contingency table used to evaluate the forecast models. We first transform our data and forecasts into binary time series where only two outcomes are possible, an occurrence of high incidence year or a non-occurrence, according if the log-IR of the year is greater or above the median which divides the dataset in half. We then compute a contingency table based on these two categories. The "hits" ("zeros") category represents the number of high (non-high) incidence rate that have been forecasted as so. The "false alarms" ("misses") category represents the number of non-high (high) incidence years that have been forecasted as high (non-high) incidence years.

Yaka et al. International Journal of Health Geographics 2008 7:34   doi:10.1186/1476-072X-7-34