Brutal Takedown of Neil Ferguson’s Model
7th May 2020
An experienced senior software engineer, Sue Denim, has written a devastating review of Dr. Neil Ferguson’s Imperial college epidemiological model that set the world on a our current lock down course of action.
Apparently Dr. Ferguson is a pretty shitty coder.
Conclusions. All papers based on this code should be retracted immediately. Imperial’s modelling efforts should be reset with a new team that isn’t under Professor Ferguson, and which has a commitment to replicable results with published code from day one.
On a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector. Insurers employ modellers and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on. Academic efforts don’t have these people, and the results speak for themselves.