Text mining self-disclosing health information for public health service

Prediction model for the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak in the global environment

COVID-19 has long become a worldwide pandemic. It is responsible for the death of over two million people and posed an economic recession. This paper studies the spread pattern of COVID-19, aiming to establish a prediction model for this event. We harness Data Mining and Machine Learning methodologies to train regression models to predict the number of confirmed cases in a spatial-temporal space. We introduce an innovative concept ‒ the Center of Infection Mass (CoIM) ‒ adapted from the field of physics. We empirically evaluated our model on western European countries, based on the CoIM index and other features, and showed that a relatively high accurate prediction of the spread can be obtained. Our contribution is twofold: first, we introduced a prediction methodology and proved empirically that a prediction can be made even to the range of over a month; second, we showed promise in adopting the CoIM index to prediction models, when models that adopt the CoIM yield significantly better results than those that discard it. By applying our model, and better controlling the inherent tradeoff between life-saving and economy, we believe that decision-makers can take close to optimal measures. Thus, this methodology may contribute to public welfare.

The Application of Internet-Based Sources for Public Health Surveillance (Infoveillance): Systematic Review

Background

Public health surveillance is based on the continuous and systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of data. This informs the development of early warning systems to monitor epidemics and documents the impact of intervention measures. The introduction of digital data sources, and specifically sources available on the internet, has impacted the field of public health surveillance. New opportunities enabled by the underlying availability and scale of internet-based sources (IBSs) have paved the way for novel approaches for disease surveillance, exploration of health communities, and the study of epidemic dynamics. This field and approach is also known as infodemiology or infoveillance.

Objective

This review aimed to assess research findings regarding the application of IBSs for public health surveillance (infodemiology or infoveillance). To achieve this, we have presented a comprehensive systematic literature review with a focus on these sources and their limitations, the diseases targeted, and commonly applied methods.

Methods

A systematic literature review was conducted targeting publications between 2012 and 2018 that leveraged IBSs for public health surveillance, outbreak forecasting, disease characterization, diagnosis prediction, content analysis, and health-topic identification. The search results were filtered according to previously defined inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Results

Spanning a total of 162 publications, we determined infectious diseases to be the preferred case study (108/162, 66.7%). Of the eight categories of IBSs (search queries, social media, news, discussion forums, websites, web encyclopedia, and online obituaries), search queries and social media were applied in 95.1% (154/162) of the reviewed publications. We also identified limitations in representativeness and biased user age groups, as well as high susceptibility to media events by search queries, social media, and web encyclopedias.

Conclusions

IBSs are a valuable proxy to study illnesses affecting the general population; however, it is important to characterize which diseases are best suited for the available sources; the literature shows that the level of engagement among online platforms can be a potential indicator. There is a necessity to understand the population’s online behavior; in addition, the exploration of health information dissemination and its content is significantly unexplored. With this information, we can understand how the population communicates about illnesses online and, in the process, benefit public health.

SocialTERM-Extractor: Identifying and Predicting Social-Problem-Specific Key Noun Terms from a Large Number of Online News Articles Using Text Mining and Machine Learning Techniques

In the digital age, the abundant unstructured data on the Internet, particularly online news articles, provide opportunities for identifying social problems and understanding social systems for sustainability. However, the previous works have not paid attention to the social-problem-specific perspectives of such big data, and it is currently unclear how information technologies can use the big data to identify and manage the ongoing social problems. In this context, this paper introduces and focuses on social-problem-specific key noun terms, namely SocialTERMs, which can be used not only to search the Internet for social-problem-related data, but also to monitor the ongoing and future events of social problems. Moreover, to alleviate time-consuming human efforts in identifying the SocialTERMs, this paper designs and examines the SocialTERM-Extractor, which is an automatic approach for identifying the key noun terms of social-problem-related topics, namely SPRTs, in a large number of online news articles and predicting the SocialTERMs among the identified key noun terms. This paper has its novelty as the first trial to identify and predict the SocialTERMs from a large number of online news articles, and it contributes to literature by proposing three types of text-mining-based features, namely temporal weight, sentiment, and complex network structural features, and by comparing the performances of such features with various machine learning techniques including deep learning. Particularly, when applied to a large number of online news articles that had been published in South Korea over a 12-month period and mostly written in Korean, the experimental results showed that Boosting Decision Tree gave the best performances with the full feature sets. They showed that the SocialTERMs can be predicted with high performances by the proposed SocialTERM-Extractor. Eventually, this paper can be beneficial for individuals or organizations who want to explore and use social-problem-related data in a systematical manner for understanding and managing social problems even though they are unfamiliar with ongoing social problems.