Population forecasting, in which past dynamics are used to make predictions of future state,
has many real-world applications. While time series of animal abundance are often modeled
in ways that aim to capture the underlying biological processes involved, doing so is neither
necessary nor sufficient for making good predictions. Here we report on a data science
competition focused on modelling time series of Antarctic penguin abundance. We describe
the best performing submitted models and compare them to a Bayesian model previously …