Tracking Dengue Epidemics using Twitter Content Classification and Topic Modelling

Detecting and preventing outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases such as Dengue and Zika in Brasil and other tropical regions has long been a priority for governments in affected areas. Streaming social media content, such as Twitter, is increasingly being used for health vigilance applications such as flu detection. However, previous work has not addressed the complexity of drastic seasonal changes on Twitter content across multiple epidemic outbreaks. In order to address this gap, this paper contrasts two complementary approaches to detecting Twitter content that is relevant for Dengue outbreak detection, namely supervised classification and unsupervised clustering using topic modelling. Each approach has benefits and shortcomings. Our classifier achieves a prediction accuracy of about 80\% based on a small training set of about 1,000 instances, but the need for manual annotation makes it hard to track seasonal changes in the nature of the epidemics, such as the emergence of new types of virus in certain geographical locations. In contrast, LDA-based topic modelling scales well, generating cohesive and well-separated clusters from larger samples. While clusters can be easily re-generated following changes in epidemics, however, this approach makes it hard to clearly segregate relevant tweets into well-defined clusters.Comment: Procs. SoWeMine - co-located with ICWE 2016. 2016, Lugano, Switzerlan

When Infodemic Meets Epidemic: a Systematic Literature Review

Epidemics and outbreaks present arduous challenges requiring both individual and communal efforts. Social media offer significant amounts of data that can be leveraged for bio-surveillance. They also provide a platform to quickly and efficiently reach a sizeable percentage of the population, hence their potential impact on various aspects of epidemic mitigation. The general objective of this systematic literature review is to provide a methodical overview of the integration of social media in different epidemic-related contexts. Three research questions were conceptualized for this review, resulting in over 10000 publications collected in the first PRISMA stage, 129 of which were selected for inclusion. A thematic method-oriented synthesis was undertaken and identified 5 main themes related to social media enabled epidemic surveillance, misinformation management, and mental health. Findings uncover a need for more robust applications of the lessons learned from epidemic post-mortem documentation. A vast gap exists between retrospective analysis of epidemic management and result integration in prospective studies. Harnessing the full potential of social media in epidemic related tasks requires streamlining the results of epidemic forecasting, public opinion understanding and misinformation propagation, all while keeping abreast of potential mental health implications. Pro-active prevention has thus become vital for epidemic curtailment and containment

Multifunctional Product Marketing Using Social Media Based on the Variable-Scale Clustering

Customers\u27 demands have become more dynamic and complicated owing to the functional diversity and lifecycle reduction of products which pushes enterprises to identify the real-time needs of distinct customers in a superior way. Meanwhile, social media turned as an emerging channel where customers often spontaneously can express their perceptions and thoughts about products promptly. This paper examines the customer satisfaction identification and improvement problem based on social media mining. First, we proposed the public opinion sensitivity index (POSI) to uncover target customers from extensive short-textual reviews. Subsequently, we presented a customer segmentation approach based on the sentiment analysis and the variable-scale clustering (VSC). The approach is able to get several customer clusters with the same satisfaction level where customers belonging to each cluster have similar interests. Finally, customer-centered marketing strategies and customer difference marketing campaigns are planned under the shadow of customer segmentation results. The experiments illustrate that our proposed method can support marketing decision marketing in practice that enriches the intention of the current customer relationship management

Identification and characterization of diseases on social web

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Using Social Media for Actionable Disease Surveillance and Outbreak Management: A Systematic Literature Review

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