English

Detecting Influenza Epidemics on Twitter

Social and Information Networks 2021-11-23 v1

Abstract

This paper presents a predictive model for Influenza-Like-Illness, based on Twitter traffic. We gather data from Twitter based on a set of keywords used in the Influenza wikipedia page, and perform feature selection over all words used in 3 years worth of tweets, using real ILI data from the Greek CDC. We select a small set of words with high correlation to the ILI score, and train a regression model to predict the ILI score cases from the word features. We deploy this model on a streaming application and feed the resulting time-series to FluHMM, an existing prediction model for the phases of the epidemic. We find that Twitter traffic offers a good source of information and can generate early warnings compared to the existing sentinel protocol using a set of associated physicians all over Greece.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.10675,
  title  = {Detecting Influenza Epidemics on Twitter},
  author = {Katerina Katsani-Geronymaki and Polyvios Pratikakis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.10675},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:46:01.148Z