Flu Detector - Tracking Epidemics on Twitter

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.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: PKDD
• Authors: Vasileios Lampos, Tijl De Bie, Nello Cristianini
• Keywords: Data Mining, Health Protection Agency, Official ILI Rates, PKDD 2010, Urban Centres