Use of social media for the detection and analysis of infectious diseases in China

Abstract

Social media activity has become an important component of daily life for many people. Messages from Twitter (US) and Weibo (China) have shown their potential as important data sources for detecting and analyzing infectious diseases. Such emerging and dynamic new data sources allow us to predict how infectious diseases develop and evolve both spatially and temporally. We report the dynamics of dengue fever in China using messages fromWeibo. We first extract and construct a list of keywords related to dengue fever in order to analyze how frequently these words appear in Weibo messages based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Spatial analysis is then applied to detect how dengue fever cases cluster spatially and spread over time.