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quantified-uncertainty / metaforecast

Fetch forecasts from prediction markets/forecasting platforms to make them searchable. Integrate these forecasts into other services.
https://metaforecast.org/
MIT License
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Terminology #40

Open berekuk opened 2 years ago

berekuk commented 2 years ago

So, the "forecast" word is a kinda ambiguous, it can mean either an entire topic, or a single prediction on a given topic.

This ambiguity is already present in the current codebase: "forecast" in numforecasts has a different meaning from the Forecast type. Or maybe I should've named the type differently?

Word "Option" from Forecast.options seems sub-optimal too, since it's so generic.

Maybe "Topic" or "Question" for questions and "Outcome" for options would be clearer? But I don't have any good ideas for response-on-topic ("bet" is too finance-related, "forecast" is still ambiguous, "prediction" is ok, I guess).

@NunoSempere, you have more experience with various platforms and their terminology, what do you think?

I'm writing this now because I'm doing DB migrations from #33, and if we merge all platform tables into a single table then we should change its name from combined to something else; also, we need to settle on a stable terminology before exposing any public APIs.

NunoSempere commented 2 years ago

How about "Question", "outcomes" and "estimate" as more specific versions of "Forecast", "options", "individual forecast"? Not sure how stable these would be, though.

Tagging @OAGr in case he has better options

NunoSempere commented 2 years ago

I'm also curious what @uvafan thinks here.

uvafan commented 2 years ago

I'd go with with "Question", "outcomes", "forecast". Btw, I think num forecasters is likely a better proxy for quality and more easily understood than num forecasts, when available.

OAGr commented 2 years ago

"Question" / "Outcome" / "Estimate" seem good to me. "Forecast" instead of "estimate" is also okay.

I think I prefer "prediction" more than "forecast", because "forecast" is often used more more broad ways. (Like, you could have a "forecast" that's just a paragraph of text explaining how you think the world will be.)

In the case of Metaforecast, we're really handling "estimates" instead of just forecasts, so having a more generic term could be good.

Another thing we could do, in the backend at least, is to have more specific terms, like, "Estimand" or "Estimatable" (Or, "Forecastable". My guess is that this isn't needed at this point.

uvafan commented 2 years ago

Oh yeah I agree with "Estimate" if some of the stuff in Metaforecast isn't forecasts about the future.

I think I prefer "prediction" more than "forecast", because "forecast" is often used more more broad ways. (Like, you could have a "forecast" that's just a paragraph of text explaining how you think the world will be.)

Interesting, I feel like they have basically the same connotation to me (a prediction feels just as likely in my head to be some qualitative statement).

OAGr commented 2 years ago

Interesting, I feel like they have basically the same connotation to me (a prediction feels just as likely in my head to be some qualitative statement).

I just looked into this a bit more; at very least, wikipedia kind of disagrees with me. But wikipedia also seems kind of confused. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forecasting

Forecasting is the process of making predictions based on past and present data.... Prediction is a similar, but more general term... for example, in hydrology the terms "forecast" and "forecasting" are sometimes reserved for estimates of values at certain specific future times, while the term "prediction" is used for more general estimates, such as the number of times floods will occur over a long period.

But on the prediction page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction

A prediction (Latin præ-, "before," and dicere, "to say"), or forecast, is a statement about a future event or data.

I think there's generally not much consensus on this.