Flu Detector ‒ Tracking Epidemics on Twitter

Submitted by bill on Sun, 15/08/2010 - 10:05
TitleFlu Detector ‒ Tracking Epidemics on Twitter
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2010
AuthorsLampos, Vasileios, De Bie Tijl, and Cristianini Nello
Conference NameEuropean Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2010)
Pagination599-602
PublisherSpringer
Conference LocationBarcelona, Spain
Abstract

We present an automated tool with a web interface for tracking the prevalence of Influenza-like Illness (ILI) in several regions of the United Kingdom using the contents of Twitter's microblogging service. Our data is comprised by a daily average of approximately 200,000 geolocated tweets collected by targeting 49 urban centres in the UK for a time period of 40 weeks. Official ILI rates from the Health Protection Agency (HPA) form our ground truth. Bolasso, the bootstrapped version of LASSO, is applied in order to extract a consistent set of features, which are then used for learning a regression model.

Visit Flu Detector's website

The following web pages complement the paper:
URLhttp://springerlink.com/content/03437106w6438777/fulltext.pdf
DOI10.1007/978-3-642-15939-8_42
Refereed DesignationRefereed
Documents: 
application/pdf iconPreprint: Flu Detector - Tracking Epidemics on Twitter
application/pdf iconPoster: Flu Detector - Tracking Epidemics on Twitter