Monitoring influenza epidemics in china with search query from baidu

Several approaches have been proposed for near real-time detection and prediction of the spread of influenza. These include search query data for influenza-related terms, which has been explored as a tool for augmenting traditional surveillance methods. In this paper, we present a method that uses I...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2013-05, Vol.8 (5), p.e64323-e64323
Main Authors: Yuan, Qingyu, Nsoesie, Elaine O, Lv, Benfu, Peng, Geng, Chunara, Rumi, Brownstein, John S
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biology
Data search
Emergency medical care
Epidemics
Filtration
Humans
Influenza
Influenza, Human - epidemiology
Mathematical models
Mathematics
Medicine
Models, Statistical
Pandemics
Population Surveillance
Queries
Reproducibility of Results
Search engines
Sensitivity and Specificity
Social Media
Studies
Swine flu
Web sites
Websites
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Summary:Several approaches have been proposed for near real-time detection and prediction of the spread of influenza. These include search query data for influenza-related terms, which has been explored as a tool for augmenting traditional surveillance methods. In this paper, we present a method that uses Internet search query data from Baidu to model and monitor influenza activity in China. The objectives of the study are to present a comprehensive technique for: (i) keyword selection, (ii) keyword filtering, (iii) index composition and (iv) modeling and detection of influenza activity in China. Sequential time-series for the selected composite keyword index is significantly correlated with Chinese influenza case data. In addition, one-month ahead prediction of influenza cases for the first eight months of 2012 has a mean absolute percent error less than 11%. To our knowledge, this is the first study on the use of search query data from Baidu in conjunction with this approach for estimation of influenza activity in China.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0064323