Prime Radiant

📜 The full build record — how this repo went from empty to registered, public, and live in three days, with the complete adversarial ledger: The Prime Radiant Record (PDF)

Calibrated forecasting, measured honestly. Two threads share this repo:

• FluSight epi forecaster (prime_radiant.epi) — CDC FluSight-format quantile forecasts of weekly US influenza hospital admissions: LightGBM quantile regression in the shape of the FluSight-2023/24-winning flusion model, ensembled with a validated replica of CDC's own baseline. Pure statistical pipeline; no LLM calls.
• Metaculus bot (prime_radiant.metaculus) — LLM forecasting on binary questions (parked at its retrieval phase; client + tests remain green).

Backtest results (three seasons, vintage-honest)

Rolling-origin backtests over 85 weekly origins across the 2023-24, 2024-25 and 2025-26 seasons. Every forecast is trained only on the data snapshot a live forecaster would have held on the Wednesday submission evening (the hub's git history is the vintage store); scored against final truth as of 2026-07-09, horizons 0-3, all 53 jurisdictions. wis_rel = mean WIS relative to the official FluSight-baseline on the common task set across all six models (lower is better; the official "scaled relative skill" collapses to this ratio on identical sets). Coverage columns are computed on each model's full scored set; relative-skill columns on the common set — n and n_relative in the CSVs disclose both.

2025-26 — our model leads the table on the natural scale (on the log(x+1) scale UMass-flusion edges it, 0.583 vs 0.585 — both columns are in the CSVs):

2024-25 — the multi-model ensembles beat us; we beat the baseline:

2023-24 — flusion dominates; our ensemble edges FluSight-ensemble:

Full tables (per-horizon rows, log-scale variants, AE-median, task counts): reports/backtest_<season>.csv. Calibration:

Honest framing

• The backtest is net biased against us, and we keep it that way. Adversarial verification proved that on three 2024-25 holiday weeks the official baseline's run saw data committed Thursday+, which our live-Wednesday vintage discipline refuses; on the 24 information-equal origins our relative WIS improves (lgbm ~0.73). It is not one-way: at three October-2023 origins our vintages were fresher than what the official run used. One 2023-24 origin (2024-04-13) had a week-stale vintage — for our models only; the officials ran on fresh data there.
• Our intervals are too narrow. The lgbm's 50% intervals cover 34-40% and its 95% intervals 74-83% — under-dispersed, visible in the calibration curves. FluSight-ensemble is better calibrated even where we beat it on WIS. This is the main modeling debt; season-level bagging (flusion's stabilizer) is the known lever.
• Wins and losses both stand. We lead 2025-26 outright; UMass-flusion beats us clearly in 2023-24 and 2024-25. The 2023-24 lgbm ran on ~1.2 seasons of training history.
• The scorer and baseline replica are self-validating — for the season they were validated on. The replica reproduces the official 2024-25 baseline to relative WIS 0.99999 on fingerprint-matched vintages (Phase B). In 2023-24 the replica scores 0.976 vs the official baseline — a spread-construction divergence at matched anchors that Phase B's validation (2024-25-era official code) does not cover; adversarially checked: substituting the actual official baseline into our ensemble changes no table ordering.

Methodology in one paragraph

NHSN weekly admissions (hub target data, git-vintaged) → per-100k 4th-root transform with per-location scale/center fitted per origin → pooled LightGBM quantile regression (23 levels, horizon-as-feature, deterministic, exact-pinned 4.7.0) → monotone sort, inversion, integer rounding at the hub boundary → per-quantile-median ensemble with the baseline replica → WIS/coverage scoring on natural and log(x+1) scales, pinned-truth, common-task relative skill. Every stage boundary carries a pandera contract; leakage invariants (vintage as-of, feature cut, scaler fit) are hypothesis-tested properties.

Setup

uv sync --all-groups
make check            # offline gates: ruff + format + pyright + pytest-cov
make test-integration # network: real hub clone, S3 benchmarks, gate + reports

Requires Homebrew libomp on macOS for LightGBM. Built with Claude Code (agentic coding assistant by Anthropic); every phase was adversarially verified by refuter agents before being declared done — see NOTES/restart.md and the [claude]-prefixed commit history.

Dashboard

Live: https://huggingface.co/spaces/jeremygracey-ai/prime-radiant

A Gradio dashboard (US choropleth of predicted 3-week change, per-state fan charts, reliability curves, model-vs-baseline league tables) serves the frozen backtest record from serve_data/, a ~1.7MB precomputed bundle:

make bundle                        # offline: rebuilds serve_data/ deterministically
uv run python dashboard/app.py     # local: http://127.0.0.1:7860

The Space (jeremygracey-ai/prime-radiant, CPU-basic) installs only gradio/plotly/pandas/pyarrow — never this package, so no LightGBM/libomp and no hub clone at serve time. .github/workflows/space-deploy.yml stages and validates the Space tree on every dispatch; the actual push is triple-gated (manual deploy=true + SPACE_LIVE=1 repo var + HF_TOKEN secret) and stays inert until go-live.

Limitations

• Single data source (NHSN), single target (wk inc flu hosp); no rate-change / peak / ED-visit targets yet.
• Interval under-dispersion as above; no season-bagging yet.
• 2022-23 is not backtestable (the hub's vintage history begins Oct 2023).
• Live submission machinery exists (Phase E) but is structurally inert: the weekly workflow's live path is triple-gated and unimplemented past its gates, and nothing submits anywhere without the go-live runbook being executed by hand. The dashboard serves a frozen bundle, not a live feed.