Traditional influenza surveillance relies on reports of influenzalike illness (ILI) by healthcare providers, capturing individuals who seek medical care and missing those who may search, post, and tweet about their illnesses instead. Existing research has shown some promise of using data from Google, Twitter, and Wikipedia for influenza surveillance, but with conflicting findings, studies have only evaluated these web-based sources individually or dually without comparing all three of them1-5. A comparative analysis of all three web-based sources is needed to know which of the web-based sources performs best in order to be considered to complement traditional methods.
Objective
To comparatively analyze Google, Twitter, and Wikipedia by evaluating how well change points detected in each web-based source correspond to change points detected in CDC ILI data.