Forecasts of climate, geopolitical conflict, pandemics and economic indicators help shape policy and decision making. This report aims to give insights into our approach for competing in the Autocast Competition 2023 and providing a descriptive analysis of the large language models and methods that were successful as well as those that could be improved. We implement training the machine learning models on the Autocast dataset and display our findings and improvements to the Future World Events Prediction task.

The latest version of the Autocast dataset can be downloaded here. For more details on how to use the Autocast dataset and news articles, please refer to our short demonstration in usage.ipynb.

Each question has the following fields:

{
  "id":                "unique identifier (str)",
  "question":          "question body (str)",
  "background":        "question context/details (str)",
  "qtype":             "question type (str)",
  "status":            "question status (str)",
  "choices":           "choices or possible ranges (List or Dict)",
  "answer":            "question resolution (str or float)",
  "crowd":             "human crowd forecasts over time (List)",
  "publish_time":      "publish timestamp (str)",
  "close_time":        "close timestamp (str)",
  "prediction_count":  "number of crowd predictions (int)",
  "forecaster_count":  "number of crowd forecasters (int)",
  "tags":              "question category (List)",
  "source_links":      "source links from comments (List)"
}

We obtained permission from Metaculus to host the dataset on GitHub for research purposes only.

To run the code, open the “autocast_submission.ipynb” file and run the cells as per the model. The submission.zip file will be created for evaluation. All the data used was taken from the auxiliary data provided in the CS542 drive. You will need “autocast_questions.json” as well as “autocast_competition_test_set.json” to replicate our results, and the “autocast_test_set_w_answers.csv” for evaluation.