Worldwide Influenza Surveillance through Twitter

Abstract

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.

Publication
AAAI Workshop on the World Wide Web and Public Health Intelligence