Web data predict flu

摘要

Two new studies hint at the public-health and research potential of mining the data created as people search the web. Both teams have successfully detected the onset of US seasonal flu epidemics, by extracting patterns of flu-related search terms from the billions of queries stored by Google and Yahoo. The work tested the hypothesis that people will more frequently search the Internet using flu-related terms when they get sick. One group used Google's search-query logs, the other Yahoo's. Together they generated strikingly concordant findings: patterns of searches matched almost perfectly with official flu surveillance data - and often weeks in advance of these. The Yahoo research1, done in conjunction with researchers at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and Harvard University, manually selected keywords for testing such as 'flu' or 'influenza while eliminating confounding terms such as 'avian' or 'bird'.