Using meta-predictions to identify experts in the crowd when past performance is unknown

PLoS One. 2020 Apr 24;15(4):e0232058. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0232058. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

A common approach to improving probabilistic forecasts is to identify and leverage the forecasts from experts in the crowd based on forecasters' performance on prior questions with known outcomes. However, such information is often unavailable to decision-makers on many forecasting problems, and thus it can be difficult to identify and leverage expertise. In the current paper, we propose a novel algorithm for aggregating probabilistic forecasts using forecasters' meta-predictions about what other forecasters will predict. We test the performance of an extremised version of our algorithm against current forecasting approaches in the literature and show that our algorithm significantly outperforms all other approaches on a large collection of 500 binary decision problems varying in five levels of difficulty. The success of our algorithm demonstrates the potential of using meta-predictions to leverage latent expertise in environments where forecasters' expertise cannot otherwise be easily identified.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Decision Making
  • Forecasting / methods*
  • Humans

Grants and funding

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Australian Government RTP Scholarship https://www.education.gov.au/research-training-program (MM), the FBE & MDHS Collaboration Seed Funding Award https://mdhs.unimelb.edu.au (PH and TW), and the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Research Award DE140101014 https://www.arc.gov.au/ (TW). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.