Temporal Topic Modeling to Assess Associations between News Trends and Infectious Disease Outbreaks.

ABSTRACT: In retrospective assessments, internet news reports have been shown to capture early reports of unknown infectious disease transmission prior to official laboratory confirmation. In general, media interest and reporting peaks and wanes during the course of an outbreak. In this study, we quantify the extent to which media interest during infectious disease outbreaks is indicative of trends of reported incidence. We introduce an approach that uses supervised temporal topic models to transform large corpora of news articles into temporal topic trends. The key advantages of this approach include: applicability to a wide range of diseases and ability to capture disease dynamics, including seasonality, abrupt peaks and troughs. We evaluated the method using data from multiple infectious disease

SUBMITTER: Ghosh S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5244405 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature