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Chinese social media analysis for disease surveillance

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Abstract

It is reported that there are hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by seasonal flu all around the world every year. More other diseases such as chickenpox, malaria, etc. are also serious threats to people’s physical and mental health. There are 250,000–500,000 deaths every year around the world. Therefore proper techniques for disease surveillance are highly demanded. Recently, social media analysis is regarded as an efficient way to achieve this goal, which is feasible since growing number of people have been posting their health information on social media such as blogs, personal websites, etc. Previous work on social media analysis mainly focused on English materials but hardly considered Chinese materials, which hinders the application of such technique to Chinese people. In this paper, we proposed a new method of Chinese social media analysis for disease surveillance. More specifically, we compared different kinds of methods in the process of classification and then proposed a new way to process Chinese text data. The Chinese Sina micro-blog data collected from September to December 2013 are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that a high classification precision of 87.49 % in average has been obtained. Comparing with the data from the authority, Chinese National Influenza Center, we can predict the outbreak time of flu 5 days earlier.

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Acknowledgments

This research is supported in part by National Nature Science Foundation of China No. 61440054, Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China No. 216-274213, and Nature Science Foundation of Hubei, China No. 2014CFA048. Outstanding Academic Talents Startup Funds of Wuhan University, No. 216-410100003 and 216-410100004.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International School of Software, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Xiaohui Cui, Nanhai Yang, Zhibo Wang, Cheng Hu, Weiping Zhu, Hanjie Li & Yujie Ji

  2. Software College, East China Institute of Technology, Nanchang, 330013, China

    Zhibo Wang

  3. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, 37831, USA

    Cheng Liu

Authors
  1. Xiaohui Cui
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  2. Nanhai Yang
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  3. Zhibo Wang
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  4. Cheng Hu
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  5. Weiping Zhu
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  6. Hanjie Li
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  7. Yujie Ji
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  8. Cheng Liu
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Correspondence to Xiaohui Cui.

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Cui, X., Yang, N., Wang, Z. et al. Chinese social media analysis for disease surveillance. Pers Ubiquit Comput 19, 1125–1132 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-015-0877-5

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