Enhancing Seasonal Influenza Surveillance: Topic Analysis of Widely Used Medicinal Drugs Using Twitter Data.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Uptake of medicinal drugs (preventive or treatment) is among the approaches used to control disease outbreaks, and therefore, it is of vital importance to be aware of the counts or frequencies of most commonly used drugs and trending topics about these drugs from consumers for successful implementation of control measures. Traditional survey methods would have accomplished this study, but they are too costly in terms of resources needed, and they are subject to social desirability bias for topics discovery. Hence, there is a need to use alternative efficient means such as Twitter data and machine learning (ML) techniques.

Objective

Using Twitter data, the aim of the study was to (1) provide a methodological extension for efficiently extracting widely consumed drug

SUBMITTER: Kagashe I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5617904 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature