Measuring Global Disease with Wikipedia: Success, Failure, and a Research Agenda.

ABSTRACT: Effective disease monitoring provides a foundation for effective public health systems. This has historically been accomplished with patient contact and bureaucratic aggregation, which tends to be slow and expensive. Recent internet-based approaches promise to be real-time and cheap, with few parameters. However, the question of when and how these approaches work remains open. We addressed this question using Wikipedia access logs and category links. Our experiments, replicable and extensible using our open source code and data, test the effect of semantic article filtering, amount of training data, forecast horizon, and model staleness by comparing across 6 diseases and 4 countries using thousands of individual models. We found that our minimal-configuration, language-agnostic arti

SUBMITTER: Priedhorsky R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5542563 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Feb-Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature