Now-Casting Building Permits with Google Trends

Spatial Trends in Barn Building Permits

This paper presents an overview of the trends in building permits issued for livestock facilities between 1996 and 2001 for 42 municipalities in the livestock intensive region of southwestern Ontario. Most of the permits were issued for barns less than 100 livestock units. Most of the permits for large facilities (larger than 500 livestock units) were exclusively for hog farms. There was no spa...

Influenza Forecasting with Google Flu Trends

BACKGROUND We developed a practical influenza forecast model based on real-time, geographically focused, and easy to access data, designed to provide individual medical centers with advanced warning of the expected number of influenza cases, thus allowing for sufficient time to implement interventions. Secondly, we evaluated the effects of incorporating a real-time influenza surveillance system...

Problematic trends: then and now.

Google Flu Trends: Spatial Correlation with Influenza Emergency Department Visits

Introduction GFT is a surveillance tool that gathers data on local internet searches to estimate the emergence of influenza-like illness in a given geographic location in real time.3 Previously, GFT has been proven to strongly correlate with influenza incidence at the national and regional level.2,3 GFT has shown promise as an easily accessed tool to enhance influenza surveillance and forecasti...

Tracking Epidemics with State-space SEIR and Google Flu Trends

In this paper we use Google Flu Trends data together with a sequential surveillance model based on the state-space methodology, to track the evolution of an epidemic process over time. We embed a classical mathematical epidemiology model (a susceptible-exposed-infectedrecovered (SEIR) model) within the state-space framework, thereby allowing the SEIR dynamics to change through time. The impleme...