Related papers: Nowcasting economic and social data: when and why …
The forecasting of political, economic, and public health indicators using internet activity has demonstrated mixed results. For example, while some measures of explicitly surveyed public opinion correlate well with social media proxies,…
Web search data are a valuable source of business and economic information. Previous studies have utilized Google Trends web search data for economic forecasting. We expand this work by providing algorithms to combine and aggregate search…
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…
Google Trends reports how frequently specific queries are searched on Google over time. It is widely used in research and industry to gain early insights into public interest. However, its data generation mechanism introduces missing…
It is widely known that Google Trends have become one of the most popular free tools used by forecasters both in academics and in the private and public sectors. There are many papers, from several different fields, concluding that Google…
In recent years, the use of databases that analyze trends, sentiments or news to make economic projections or create indicators has gained significant popularity, particularly with the Google Trends platform. This article explores the…
Influenza epidemics result in a public health and economic burden around the globe. Traditional surveillance techniques, which rely on doctor visits, provide data with a delay of 1-2 weeks. A means of obtaining real-time data and…
Among other macroeconomic indicators, the monthly release of U.S. unemployment rate figures in the Employment Situation report by the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics gets a lot of media attention and strongly affects the stock markets. I…
Online searches have been used to study different health-related behaviours, including monitoring disease outbreaks. An obvious caveat is that several reasons can motivate individuals to seek online information and models that are blind to…
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.…
We check the claims that data from Google Trends contain enough data to predict future financial index returns. We first discuss the many subtle (and less subtle) biases that may affect the backtest of a trading strategy, particularly when…
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,…
Influenza is an infectious disease with the potential to become a pandemic, and hence, forecasting its prevalence is an important undertaking for planning an effective response. Research has found that web search activity can be used to…
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.…
Given the ever increasing amount of publicly available social media data, there is growing interest in using online data to study and quantify phenomena in the offline "real" world. As social media data can be obtained in near real-time and…
Alternative data sets are widely used for macroeconomic nowcasting together with machine learning--based tools. The latter are often applied without a complete picture of their theoretical nowcasting properties. Against this background,…
The new digital revolution of big data is deeply changing our capability of understanding society and forecasting the outcome of many social and economic systems. Unfortunately, information can be very heterogeneous in the importance,…
For epidemics control and prevention, timely insights of potential hot spots are invaluable. Alternative to traditional epidemic surveillance, which often lags behind real time by weeks, big data from the Internet provide important…
Online activity of the Internet users has been repeatedly shown to provide a rich information set for various research fields. We focus on the job-related searches on Google and their possible usefulness in the region of the Visegrad Group…
The accurate forecasting of infectious epidemic diseases such as influenza is a crucial task undertaken by medical institutions. Although numerous flu forecasting methods and models based mainly on historical flu activity data and online…