Commentary on “Transparent modelling of influenza incidence”: Is the answer simplicity or adaptability?

It is a pleasure to comment on the paper by Katsikopoulos et al. (2021), where they present a provocative and stimulating viewpoint in which they argue that simple forecasting rules based on heuristics frequently outperform big data models and should be used as a benchmark when testing big data models. I argue that it is important not to conflate simplicity with adaptability, and that there is a role for big data models in forecasting.