Regional Influenza Prediction with Sampling Twitter Data and PDE Model

Yufang Wang, Kuai Xu, Yun Kang, Haiyan Wang, Feng Wang and Adrian Avram
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Yufang Wang: School of Statistics, Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, Tianjin 300222, China
Kuai Xu: School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ 85069, USA
Yun Kang: Science and Mathematics Faculty, Arizona State University, Mesa, AZ 85212, USA
Haiyan Wang: School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ 85069, USA
Feng Wang: School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ 85069, USA
Adrian Avram: School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ 85069, USA

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 3, 1-12

Abstract: The large volume of geotagged Twitter streaming data on flu epidemics provides chances for researchers to explore, model, and predict the trends of flu cases in a timely manner. However, the explosive growth of data from social media makes data sampling a natural choice. In this paper, we develop a method for influenza prediction based on the real-time tweet data from social media, and this method ensures real-time prediction and is applicable to sampling data. Specifically, we first simulate the sampling process of flu tweets, and then develop a specific partial differential equation (PDE) model to characterize and predict the aggregated flu tweet volumes. Our PDE model incorporates the effects of flu spreading, flu recovery, and active human interventions for reducing flu. Our extensive simulation results show that this PDE model can almost eliminate the data reduction effects from the sampling process: It requires lesser historical data but achieves stronger prediction results with a relative accuracy of over 90% on the 1% sampling data. Even for the more aggressive data sampling ratios such as 0.1% and 0.01% sampling, our model is still able to achieve relative accuracies of 85% and 83%, respectively. These promising results highlight the ability of our mechanistic PDE model in predicting temporal–spatial patterns of flu trends even in the scenario of small sampling Twitter data.

Keywords: flu prediction; sampling tweets data; PDE model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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