Residential Mobility and Lung Cancer Risk: Data-Driven Exploration Using Internet Sources

摘要

Frequent relocation has been linked to health decline, particularly with respect to emotional and psychological wellbeing. In this paper we investigate whether there is an association between frequent relocation and lung cancer risk. For the initial investigation we used web crawling and tailored text mining to collect cancer and control subjects from online data sources. One data source includes online obituaries. The second data source includes augmented LinkedIn profiles. For each data source, the subjects’ spatiotemporal history is reconstructed from the available information provided in the obituaries and from the education and work experience provided in the LinkedIn profiles. The study shows that lung cancer subjects have higher mobility frequency than the control group. This trend is consistent for both data sources.