Adaptive nowcasting of influenza outbreaks using Google searches

Royal Society Open Science - Tập 1 Số 2 - Trang 140095 - 2014
Tobias Preis1, Helen Susannah Moat1
1Warwick Business School, University of Warwick,

Tóm tắt

Seasonal influenza outbreaks and pandemics of new strains of the influenza virus affect humans around the globe. However, traditional systems for measuring the spread of flu infections deliver results with one or two weeks delay. Recent research suggests that data on queries made to the search engine Google can be used to address this problem, providing real-time estimates of levels of influenza-like illness in a population. Others have however argued that equally good estimates of current flu levels can be forecast using historic flu measurements. Here, we build dynamic ‘nowcasting’ models; in other words, forecasting models that estimate current levels of influenza, before the release of official data one week later. We find that when using Google Flu Trends data in combination with historic flu levels, the mean absolute error (MAE) of in-sample ‘nowcasts’ can be significantly reduced by 14.4%, compared with a baseline model that uses historic data on flu levels only. We further demonstrate that the MAE of out-of-sample nowcasts can also be significantly reduced by between 16.0% and 52.7%, depending on the length of the sliding training interval. We conclude that, using adaptive models, Google Flu Trends data can indeed be used to improve real-time influenza monitoring, even when official reports of flu infections are available with only one week's delay.

Từ khóa


Tài liệu tham khảo

10.1126/science.1167742

10.1017/S0140525X13001817

10.1126/science.1171990

10.1126/science.1197872

10.1098/rsta.2010.0284

10.1111/j.1475-4932.2012.00809.x

10.1038/srep00350

10.1371/journal.pone.0095209

10.1038/srep01684

10.1038/srep02713

Curme C, 2014, Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA, 11600

10.1371/journal.pone.0040014

10.1371/journal.pone.0038869

10.1038/srep01801

10.1038/srep03415

10.1016/j.jocs.2010.12.007

10.1038/srep03141

10.1038/srep03578

10.1086/593098

10.1038/nature07634

10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003581

10.1371/journal.pone.0019467

Goel S, 2010, Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA, 17486

10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003256

10.1126/science.1248506

10.1016/j.amepre.2014.05.020

Preis T, 2014, Data from adaptive nowcasting of influenza outbreaks using Google searches, Dryad Repository.

10.1371/journal.pone.0023610

Makridakis S, 1998, Forecasting methods and applications, 3

Stock JH, 2011, Introduction to econometrics, 3

Thông tin
: []
Thông tin xuất bản

Royal Society Open Science

Tập 1 Số 2

140095

Thông tin tác giả