Get reasoned probabilities and explanations from our online crowd-forecasting platform

Increase your forecast accuracy up to 30 %

Outperform statistical methods 70 % of the time

Hypermind Prescience
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Your community of forecasters

Your employees makes probability forecasts on specific questions.

Prediction market / algorithm

Our prediction markets and proprietary algorithms combine their diverging perspectives, according to the science of collective intelligence.

Hypermind Prescience

Reliable forecasts

Anticipate strategic issues: business environment, KPI, geopolitical events, economy. Assess risk and uncertainty.

Our crowd forecasting platform

Reliably predict the probability of complex events, from elections, to GDP, to infectious disease and more.

GDP

election outcomes

infectious diseases

sales volumes

Hypermind's forecasting accuracy on over 875,000 forecasts

The forecasts of our prediction market almost perfectly match the observed frequency of events, at all levels of probability.

Reality seemingly aligns itself with our crow forecasts.
For example: 70% of all events estimated to have a 70% chance of happening have actually happened.

Reality

Frequency of occurrence of predicted outcomes

99 % correlation between prediction and reality

All events forecasted with a 70 % probability actually happen 70 % of the time.

Each data point in this graph answers the question:
"What is the proportion of events forecasted with probability p that actually happen ?"

Predicted probability

Observed probabilities

Predicted probability

Outcome prices on the prediction market

Data based on:

875 735

forecasts

816

geopolitical / economic questions

2 535

possible outcomes

8,5

years (2014 – 2022)

Hypermind Prescience Platform

Future-proof your business by anticipating risks and opportunities

Smart decisions come from a clear vision of what is to come.
Precisely quantify what is often left to guesswork, and see further into the future.

Why use collective intelligence to forecast ?

Forecasting can be tough, especially when there are too many variables for individual experts to consider, and too few structured data to train an AI.

But crowds of human forecasters excel at prediction complex problems.

Our technology has pioneered a way to gather and combine valuable information from a crowd of diverse forecasters and turn it into reliable insights so you can make informed decisions.

Prediction poll Prescience forecasting method

How it works: our prediction market and prediction poll

Prescience draws reliable predictions from a crowd of vetted forecasters by following a 4 step process :

Future Africa 2022

The Future of Africa – 2022 predictions

What will happen in West Africa in 2022 ? Le Point Afrique and Hypermind have gathered predictions on the future of Africa and Côte d’Ivoire in particular via a forecasting contest with over 300 participants, and 1600 predictions.

Read More »

A prediction market is a competitive betting game designed to predict specific future events or quantities by tapping into the collective intelligence of a large group of participants. Prediction markets combine many diverging viewpoints, expressed as probability forecasts, into a single probability. This collective estimate changes in real time according to all the available information to human minds.

Individual forecasters place bets on outcomes and receive payouts based on their success. The best forecasters are given more weight in the final mix.

Businesses and governments have been using prediction markets in various settings:

  • Intel, Hewlett Packard, Ford, Eli Lilly, and EDF (Electricité de France) have used prediction markets to anticipate KPIs, market shifts, sales volumes, a product’s chances of success, and delays in projects.
  • The US intelligence community used prediction markets in geopolitical forecasting to understand the likelihood of election results, wars and diplomatic events.
  • In the public health sector, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security has used crowd forecasting to anticipate the spread and severity of infectious diseases like dengue, malaria and Covid-19.

Prediction markets are most useful when forecasting short to medium term observable events (under 24 months), especially in the following cases:

When the past becomes irrelevant:

Traditional forecasting methods such as time series forecasting rely on the past to predict the future, the assumption being that the past can inform the future. 

But sometimes you’ll have little relevant or reliable data at your disposal to make useful projections, and hanging on to historical data may skew your forecasts. Predictions markets aggregate all the available relevant data using the wisdom of crowds.

When knowledge is decentralized:

Nobody knows everything, but everybody knows something. Usually, we solve hard problems by asking an expert: an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer. But sometimes when a problem is too complex,  when too many variables are involved for a single expert to handle, or when there is too little data to train an artificial intelligence individual expertise falls short.

Prediction markets (or prediction polls like our Prescience platform) help consolidate the informed guesses of the many based on all the available data.

When the situation is fluid:

Forecasts need to integrate new information continuously, you need real time forecasts to be able to react accordingly. 

Human forecasters excel at integrating new information because they spot things that AI would miss, information available on the ground but not yet in data bases.

Prediction markets (or prediction polls) offer 3 main advantages for companies and governments seeking a clearer view of the future:

  • Prediction markets shine under uncertainty. They excel at accurate prediction where other methods fail because they do not rely on AI crunching structured data, but on the informed guesswork of a diversely minded crowd of humans. (hence “crowd forecasting”)

  • Prediction markets offer precise predictions expressed as probability forecasts. Saying an event is “probable” means different things to different people. “Probable” could mean a 60% chance to one person, but 85% to another. Numbers make things crystal clear, so you can make an informed decision.

  • Prediction markets are a sturdy and trustworthy forecasting method. By gathering information from many minds thanks to an objective aggregation process, prediction markets easily outperform biased or noisy individual judgments. Relying on a crowd helps reduce the risk of listening to the wrong person, instead trusting a decentralized network of independent points of view.

The first modern prediction market began in 1988 as an academic research project at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business and offered forecasts on that year’s US presidential election. The World Wide Web soon enabled the launch of larger prediction markets targeted at the general public, sometimes bearing other names, like betting exchanges or idea futures.

Hypermind’s pioneering prediction market was first launched in 2000 under the name NewsFutures.

Over the years, this form of “crowd wisdom” has acquired an impressive track record of accurate forecasting in diverse fields ranging from sports and film to business, elections, geopolitics and even medicine.

Prediction Market forecasts are probabilistic. They answer the question: “What are the chances that this or that outcome will come true?” The best way to assess accuracy in the absolute is over many events, by comparing the probability estimations against observed event frequencies.

Here’s a comparison at every level of probability from 1% to 99%, over 8.5 years, on 816 questions with 2535 possible outcomes, on a range of international topics from elections, geopolitics, economics, and business.

The figure allows us to answer the following question:
“Of all the events predicted by Hypermind to be x% likely, what percentage actually occurred?”

The closer to x% the answer; i.e., the closer the data points sit to the chart’s diagonal (bottom left to top right), the more accurate the market’s probabilities.

You can use prediction markets to forecast four types of questions:

  • binary: “will John Doe win the election ?” (yes/no)
  • discrete: “who will win the election ?”(John, Jane, Kane)
  • ordered: “what will John Doe’s share of the vote be ?” (more than 55% / 50 to 55% / 45 to 50% …)
  • linear: “what will John Doe’s share of the vote be ?” (market price = predicted vote share in %)

They have been used to predict events in various application domains like sports, elections, geopolitics, medicine, science and technology.