Related papers: Predicting the Flu from Instagram
We introduce the use of a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) for influenza prediction at the state- and city-level in the US, and experiment with the inclusion of real-time flu-related Internet search data. We find that a GRU has lower prediction…
Social media provide a wealth of information for research into public health by providing a rich mix of personal data, location, hashtags, and social network information. Among these, Instagram has been recently the subject of many…
Influenza viruses mutate rapidly and can pose a threat to public health, especially to those in vulnerable groups. Throughout history, influenza A viruses have caused pandemics between different species. It is important to identify the…
Knowledge about the daily number of new infections of Covid-19 is important because it is the basis for political decisions resulting in lockdowns and urgent health care measures. We use Germany as an example to illustrate shortcomings of…
Forecasting the future course of epidemics has always been one of the main goals of epidemic modelling. This chapter reviews statistical methods to quantify the accuracy of epidemic forecasts. We distinguish point and probabilistic…
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…
Dengue is a major threat to public health in Brazil, the world's sixth biggest country by population, with over 1.5 million cases recorded in 2019 alone. Official data on dengue case counts is delivered incrementally and, for many reasons,…
Influenza forecasting in the United States (US) is complex and challenging for reasons including substantial spatial and temporal variability, nested geographic scales of forecast interest, and heterogeneous surveillance participation. Here…
Individuals in low socioeconomic brackets are considered at-risk for developing influenza-related complications and often exhibit higher than average influenza-related hospitalization rates. This disparity has been attributed to various…
Seasonal influenza infects between 10 and 50 million people in the United States every year, overburdening hospitals during weeks of peak incidence. Named by the CDC as an important tool to fight the damaging effects of these epidemics,…
Public health interventions are a fundamental tool for mitigating the spread of an infectious disease. However, it is not always possible to obtain a conclusive estimate for the impact of an intervention, especially in situations where the…
We consider the problem of detecting an epidemic in a population where individual diagnoses are extremely noisy. The motivation for this problem is the plethora of examples (influenza strains in humans, or computer viruses in smartphones,…
Models of contagion dynamics, originally developed for infectious diseases, have proven relevant to the study of information, news, and political opinions in online social systems. Modelling diffusion processes and predicting viral…
Spotting and removing fake profiles could curb the menace of fake news in society. This paper, thus, investigates fake profile detection in social networks via users' typing patterns. We created a novel dataset of 468 posts from 26 users on…
Social media data provides propitious opportunities for public health research. However, studies suggest that disparities may exist in the representation of certain populations (e.g., people of lower socioeconomic status). To quantify and…
Parameter inference and state estimation in stochastic and partially observed biological systems remain major problems in mathematical biology. In this work, we introduce a two-dimensional lattice graph model for the spread of infectious…
Digital public health monitoring has long relied on data from major social media platforms. Twitter was once an indispensable resource for tracking disease outbreaks and public sentiment in real time. Researchers used Twitter to monitor…
A vast amount of textual web streams is influenced by events or phenomena emerging in the real world. The social web forms an excellent modern paradigm, where unstructured user generated content is published on a regular basis and in most…
Estimation of mis/disinformation prevalence in social media is crucial for designing mitigation strategies to limit its impact. Yet, such estimations are subject to several uncertainties that are rarely quantified jointly. In this study, we…
The importance of the ability of predict trends in social media has been growing rapidly in the past few years with the growing dominance of social media in our everyday's life. Whereas many works focus on the detection of anomalies in…