FluCast

Model Performance

Ridge Regression · trained on CDC ILINet 2020–2025

CDC LIVE
2026-W21
0.89
MAE
0.31pp
RMSE
0.42pp

Observed vs Predicted

Trailing 40 weeks

Residual Errors

Predicted − Observed (pp)

Feature Importance

Permutation importance — Ridge Regression

ILI_lag1
42%
rolling_3w
18%
ILI_lag2
12%
sin_week
9%
cos_week
7%
ILI_lag3
6%
temperature
4%
precipitation
2%

Metric Definitions

R²:
share of variance the model captures — closer to 1 is better.
MAE:
average absolute weekly prediction error in percentage points.
RMSE:
root mean squared error — penalizes large misses more heavily.
Residuals:
per-week deviation; clustering above/below zero reveals bias.