Related papers: Enhancing Twitter Data Analysis with Simple Semant…
We analyze over 500 million Twitter messages from an eight month period and find that tracking a small number of flu-related keywords allows us to forecast future influenza rates with high accuracy, obtaining a 95% correlation with national…
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…
We present a machine learning-based methodology capable of providing real-time ("nowcast") and forecast estimates of influenza activity in the US by leveraging data from multiple data sources including: Google searches, Twitter microblogs,…
Background: Micro-blogging services such as Twitter offer the potential to crowdsource epidemics in real-time. However, Twitter posts ('tweets') are often ambiguous and reactive to media trends. In order to ground user messages in epidemic…
Influenza-like illness (ILI) estimation from web search data is an important web analytics task. The basic idea is to use the frequencies of queries in web search logs that are correlated with past ILI activity as features when estimating…
While digital trace data from sources like search engines hold enormous potential for tracking and understanding human behavior, these streams of data lack information about the actual experiences of those individuals generating the data.…
Conventional surveillance systems for monitoring infectious diseases, such as influenza, face challenges due to shortage of skilled healthcare professionals, remoteness of communities and absence of communication infrastructures.…
Social media has been considered as a data source for tracking disease. However, most analyses are based on models that prioritize strong correlation with population-level disease rates over determining whether or not specific individual…
Seasonal influenza is a sometimes surprisingly impactful disease, causing thousands of deaths per year along with much additional morbidity. Timely knowledge of the outbreak state is valuable for managing an effective response. The current…
Twitter messages (tweets) contain various types of information, which include health-related information. Analysis of health-related tweets would help us understand health conditions and concerns encountered in our daily life. In this work,…
Infectious diseases are one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality around the world; thus, forecasting their impact is crucial for planning an effective response strategy. According to the Centers for Disease Control and…
Public health surveillance systems often fail to detect emerging infectious diseases, particularly in resource limited settings. By integrating relevant clinical and internet-source data, we can close critical gaps in coverage and…
Influenza is an acute respiratory seasonal disease that affects millions of people worldwide and causes thousands of deaths in Europe alone. Being able to estimate in a fast and reliable way the impact of an illness on a given country is…
We provide a brief technical description of an online platform for disease monitoring, titled as the Flu Detector (fludetector.cs.ucl.ac.uk). Flu Detector, in its current version (v.0.5), uses either Twitter or Google search data in…
Recent studies have shown strong correlation between social networking data and national influenza rates. We expanded upon this success to develop an automated text mining system that classifies Twitter messages in real time into six…
In this work we address the issue of generic automated disease incidence monitoring on twitter. We employ an ontology of disease related concepts and use it to obtain a conceptual representation of tweets. Unlike previous key word based…
Influenza is an acute respiratory illness that occurs virtually every year and results in substantial disease, death and expense. Detection of Influenza in its earliest stage would facilitate timely action that could reduce the spread of…
Early prediction of the prevalence of influenza reduces its impact. Various studies have been conducted to predict the number of influenza-infected people. However, these studies are not highly accurate especially in the distant future such…
Big data collected from the Internet possess great potential to reveal the ever-changing trends in society. In particular, accurate infectious disease tracking with Internet data has grown in popularity, providing invaluable information for…
Accurate real-time tracking of influenza outbreaks helps public health officials make timely and meaningful decisions that could save lives. We propose an influenza tracking model, ARGO (AutoRegression with GOogle search data), that uses…