Fig. 10.

Representative 5-week ahead forecasts of the sub-epidemic model to the ongoing Ebola epidemic in DRC. Overall, we found that the epidemic wave model predicts a “traveling wave” with some oscillatory behavior that is shaped by a sub-epidemic profile of consecutive outbreaks. More specifically, the model consistently outperformed the simpler growth models in short-term forecasts based on all of the performance metrics (Table 4). However, the last forecast was unable to capture a significant increase in the incidence pattern associated with the fourth sub-epidemic of the epidemic wave profile shown in Fig. 11. Black circles correspond to the data points. The model fit (solid red line) and 95% prediction interval (dashed red lines) are also shown. The vertical line indicates the start time of the forecast