Worldwide Influenza Surveillance through Twitter
نویسندگان
چکیده
We evaluate the performance of Twitter-based influenza surveillance in ten English-speaking countries across four continents. We find that tweets are positively correlated with existing surveillance data provided by government agencies in these countries, with r values ranging from .37–.81. We show that incorporating Twitter data into a strong autoregressive baseline reduces mean squared error in 80 to 100 percent of locations depending on the lag, with larger improvements when reporting delays are longer.
منابع مشابه
Using Social Media to Perform Local Influenza Surveillance in an Inner-City Hospital: A Retrospective Observational Study
BACKGROUND Public health officials and policy makers in the United States expend significant resources at the national, state, county, and city levels to measure the rate of influenza infection. These individuals rely on influenza infection rate information to make important decisions during the course of an influenza season driving vaccination campaigns, clinical guidelines, and medical staffi...
متن کاملInfluenza-Like Illness Surveillance on Twitter through Automated Learning of Naïve Language
Twitter has the potential to be a timely and cost-effective source of data for syndromic surveillance. When speaking of an illness, Twitter users often report a combination of symptoms, rather than a suspected or final diagnosis, using naïve, everyday language. We developed a minimally trained algorithm that exploits the abundance of health-related web pages to identify all jargon expressions r...
متن کاملSeparating Fact from Fear: Tracking Flu Infections on Twitter
Twitter has been shown to be a fast and reliable method for disease surveillance of common illnesses like influenza. However, previous work has relied on simple content analysis, which conflates flu tweets that report infection with those that express concerned awareness of the flu. By discriminating these categories, as well as tweets about the authors versus about others, we demonstrate signi...
متن کاملTwitter Influenza Surveillance: Quantifying Seasonal Misdiagnosis Patterns and their Impact on Surveillance Estimates
BACKGROUND Influenza (flu) surveillance using Twitter data can potentially save lives and increase efficiency by providing governments and healthcare organizations with greater situational awareness. However, research is needed to determine the impact of Twitter users' misdiagnoses on surveillance estimates. OBJECTIVE This study establishes the importance of Twitter users' misdiagnoses by sho...
متن کاملA Review of Influenza Surveillance System in the Islamic Republic of Iran: History, Structures and Processes
Background and Objectives: Iran, like most other countries in the world, is always threatened with global epidemics and pandemics of influenza. The purpose of this study was to review the influenza surveillance system in Iran. Methods: Data of this study were obtained from the surveillance system of the Center for Communicable Disease Control, the review of records, documents, books and pub...
متن کامل