Combining Search, Social Media, and Traditional Data Sources to Improve Influenza Surveillance

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, nearly real-time hospital visit records, and data from a participatory surveillance system. Our main contribution consists of combining multiple influenza-like illnesses (ILI) activity estimates, generated independently with each data source, into a single prediction of ILI utilizing machine learning ensemble approaches. Our methodology exploits the information in each data source and produces accurate weekly ILI predictions for up to four weeks ahead of the release of CDC's ILI reports. We evaluate the predictive ability of our ensemble approach during the 2013-2014 (retrospective) and 2014-2015 (live) flu seasons for each of the four weekly time horizons. Our ensemble approach demonstrates several advantages: (1) our ensemble method's predictions outperform every prediction using each data source independently, (2) our methodology can produce predictions one week ahead of GFT's real-time estimates with comparable accuracy, and (3) our two and three week forecast estimates have comparable accuracy to real-time predictions using an autoregressive model. Moreover, our results show that considerable insight is gained from incorporating disparate data streams, in the form of social media and crowd sourced data, into influenza predictions in all time horizon

A Review of Influenza Detection and Prediction Through Social Networking Sites

Early prediction of seasonal epidemics such as influenza may reduce their impact in daily lives. Nowadays, the web can be used for surveillance of diseases. Search engines and social networking sites can be used to track trends of different diseases seven to ten days faster than government agencies such as Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). CDC uses the Illness-Like Influenza Surveillance Network (ILINet), which is a program used to monitor Influenza-Like Illness (ILI) sent by thousands of health care providers in order to detect influenza outbreaks. It is a reliable tool, however, it is slow and expensive. For that reason, many studies aim to develop methods that do real time analysis to track ILI using social networking sites. Social media data such as Twitter can be used to predict the spread of flu in the population and can help in getting early warnings. Today, social networking sites (SNS) are used widely by many people to share thoughts and even health status. Therefore, SNS provides an efficient resource for disease surveillance and a good way to communicate to prevent disease outbreaks. The goal of this study is to review existing alternative solutions that track flu outbreak in real time using social networking sites and web blogs. Many studies have shown that social networking sites can be used to conduct real time analysis for better predictions.https://doi.org/10.1186/s12976-017-0074-

Epidemiological Prediction using Deep Learning

Department of Mathematical SciencesAccurate and real-time epidemic disease prediction plays a significant role in the health system and is of great importance for policy making, vaccine distribution and disease control. From the SIR model by Mckendrick and Kermack in the early 1900s, researchers have developed a various mathematical model to forecast the spread of disease. With all attempt, however, the epidemic prediction has always been an ongoing scientific issue due to the limitation that the current model lacks flexibility or shows poor performance. Owing to the temporal and spatial aspect of epidemiological data, the problem fits into the category of time-series forecasting. To capture both aspects of the data, this paper proposes a combination of recent Deep Leaning models and applies the model to ILI (influenza like illness) data in the United States. Specifically, the graph convolutional network (GCN) model is used to capture the geographical feature of the U.S. regions and the gated recurrent unit (GRU) model is used to capture the temporal dynamics of ILI. The result was compared with the Deep Learning model proposed by other researchers, demonstrating the proposed model outperforms the previous methods.clos

Global disease monitoring and forecasting with Wikipedia

Infectious disease is a leading threat to public health, economic stability, and other key social structures. Efforts to mitigate these impacts depend on accurate and timely monitoring to measure the risk and progress of disease. Traditional, biologically-focused monitoring techniques are accurate but costly and slow; in response, new techniques based on social internet data such as social media and search queries are emerging. These efforts are promising, but important challenges in the areas of scientific peer review, breadth of diseases and countries, and forecasting hamper their operational usefulness. We examine a freely available, open data source for this use: access logs from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Using linear models, language as a proxy for location, and a systematic yet simple article selection procedure, we tested 14 location-disease combinations and demonstrate that these data feasibly support an approach that overcomes these challenges. Specifically, our proof-of-concept yields models with $r^2$ up to 0.92, forecasting value up to the 28 days tested, and several pairs of models similar enough to suggest that transferring models from one location to another without re-training is feasible. Based on these preliminary results, we close with a research agenda designed to overcome these challenges and produce a disease monitoring and forecasting system that is significantly more effective, robust, and globally comprehensive than the current state of the art.Comment: 27 pages; 4 figures; 4 tables. Version 2: Cite McIver & Brownstein and adjust novelty claims accordingly; revise title; various revisions for clarit

Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Data for Predicting Stock Market Movements

Predicting stock market movements is a well-known problem of interest. Now-a-days social media is perfectly representing the public sentiment and opinion about current events. Especially, twitter has attracted a lot of attention from researchers for studying the public sentiments. Stock market prediction on the basis of public sentiments expressed on twitter has been an intriguing field of research. Previous studies have concluded that the aggregate public mood collected from twitter may well be correlated with Dow Jones Industrial Average Index (DJIA). The thesis of this work is to observe how well the changes in stock prices of a company, the rises and falls, are correlated with the public opinions being expressed in tweets about that company. Understanding author's opinion from a piece of text is the objective of sentiment analysis. The present paper have employed two different textual representations, Word2vec and N-gram, for analyzing the public sentiments in tweets. In this paper, we have applied sentiment analysis and supervised machine learning principles to the tweets extracted from twitter and analyze the correlation between stock market movements of a company and sentiments in tweets. In an elaborate way, positive news and tweets in social media about a company would definitely encourage people to invest in the stocks of that company and as a result the stock price of that company would increase. At the end of the paper, it is shown that a strong correlation exists between the rise and falls in stock prices with the public sentiments in tweets.Comment: 6 pages 4 figures Conference Pape

Traffic event detection framework using social media

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by IEEE in 2017 IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid and Smart Cities (ICSGSC) on 18/09/2017, available online: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8038595 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.© 2017 IEEE. Traffic incidents are one of the leading causes of non-recurrent traffic congestions. By detecting these incidents on time, traffic management agencies can activate strategies to ease congestion and travelers can plan their trip by taking into consideration these factors. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in Twitter because of the real-time nature of its data. Twitter has been used as a way of predicting revenues, accidents, natural disasters, and traffic. This paper proposes a framework for the real-time detection of traffic events using Twitter data. The methodology consists of a text classification algorithm to identify traffic related tweets. These traffic messages are then geolocated and further classified into positive, negative, or neutral class using sentiment analysis. In addition, stress and relaxation strength detection is performed, with the purpose of further analyzing user emotions within the tweet. Future work will be carried out to implement the proposed framework in the West Midlands area, United Kingdom.Published versio

Efficient Text Classification with Linear Regression Using a Combination of Predictors for Flu Outbreak Detection

Early prediction of disease outbreaks and seasonal epidemics such as Influenza may reduce their impact on daily lives. Today, the web can be used for surveillance of diseases.Search engines and Social Networking Sites can be used to track trends of different diseases more quickly than government agencies such as Center of Disease Control and Prevention(CDC). Today, Social Networking Sites (SNS) are widely used by diverse demographic populations. Thus, SNS data can be used effectively to track disease outbreaks and provide necessary warnings. Although the generated data of microblogging sites is valuable for real time analysis and outbreak predictions, the volume is huge. Therefore, one of the main challenges in analyzing this huge volume of data is to find the best approach for accurate analysis in an efficient time. Regardless of the analysis time, many studies show only the accuracy of applying different machine learning approaches. Current SNS-based flu detection and prediction frameworks apply conventional machine learning approaches that require lengthy training and testing, which is not the optimal solution for new outbreaks with new signs and symptoms. The aim of this study is to propose an efficient and accurate framework that uses SNS data to track disease outbreaks and provide early warnings, even for newest outbreaks accurately. The presented framework of outbreak prediction consists of three main modules: text classification, mapping, and linear regression for weekly flu rate predictions. The text classification module utilizes the features of sentiment analysis and predefined keyword occurrences. Various classifiers, including FastText and six conventional machine learning algorithms, are evaluated to identify the most efficient and accurate one for the proposed framework. The text classifiers have been trained and tested using a pre-labeled dataset of flu-related and unrelated Twitter postings. The selected text classifier is then used to classify over 8,400,000 tweet documents. The flu-related documents are then mapped ona weekly basis using a mapping module. Lastly, the mapped results are passed together with historical Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data to a linear regression module for weekly flu rate predictions. The evaluation of flu tweet classification shows that FastText together with the extracted features, has achieved accurate results with anF-measure value of 89.9% in addition to its efficiency. Therefore, FastText has been chosen to be the classification module to work together with the other modules in the proposed framework, including the linear regression module, for flu trend predictions. The prediction results are compared with the available recent data from CDC as the ground truth and show a strong correlation of 96.2%