Forecasting Seasons

In long running forecasting tournaments, leaderboards can start to become relatively static. The resolution of new questions may produce minor shuffling, but it becomes difficult for users to improve their position, since so many questions have already resolved. This can be discouraging for new users and frustrating for users who started out poorly, leaving them in a deep hole. Further, it can be demotivating for forecasters who feel they have already "won the game."

To help give these users a fresh start and to provide new motivation for top forecasters to prove they can "do it again," Cultivate Forecasts supports a concept we call "Forecasting Seasons." A new season is started yearly (or some other period/cadence, specified by an administrator) and each question is assigned to a single season. The platform then tracks a Brier Score and Relative Brier Score for each forecaster based on questions belonging to that season. Each time a new season starts, the platform will start displaying performance information related to the new/current season.

When Forecasting Seasons are enabled, the overall leaderboard will display scores for the current season. Leaderboards for past seasons are archived, but still accessible, and an all-time leaderboard is also available (when enabled by site administrators):

In addition to leaderboard changes, your personal forecasting dashboard will show performance information (score & rank) related to the current season (with past season's performance still accessible):

When you hover over a forecaster's username, you'll see their current season rank:

And lastly, past season performance is available on each forecaster's profile: