ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Probabilistic forecasting

Probabilistic forecasting is like guessing what might happen in the future but with a little bit of math to help us be more accurate. It's like when we play a guessing game where we have to predict how many jelly beans are in a jar, but instead of just guessing one number, we make a bunch of guesses based on what we think is most likely to happen.

Let's say we want to predict how much it will rain tomorrow. We can use a lot of information to make our guess, like looking at past weather patterns, seeing if there are clouds in the sky, and checking the weather forecast. But we know that even if we use all this information, we still might not be exactly right. That's where probabilistic forecasting comes in.

Probabilistic forecasting helps us to calculate the chance that something will happen. So instead of just saying it will rain tomorrow, we can say there is a 70% chance of rain. That means out of 100 times we predict rain in these conditions, it's probably going to rain about 70 of those times.

It's like when we roll a dice. We know there are six possible outcomes (rolling a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6), so we can say that the chance of getting a 1 is about 1 out of 6. That means if we roll the dice six times, we would expect to get a 1 about once.

Probabilistic forecasting lets us take a lot of different factors into account when making a prediction, and helps us to communicate how confident we are in our guess. It's like playing a game of chance, where we use what we know to make the best guess we can, and then hope for the best!