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You Are What You Tweet: Analyzing Twitter for Public Health

Michael J. Paul, +1 more
- Vol. 5, Iss: 1, pp 265-272
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TLDR
This work applies the recently introduced Ailment Topic Aspect Model to over one and a half million health related tweets and discovers mentions of over a dozen ailments, including allergies, obesity and insomnia, suggesting that Twitter has broad applicability for public health research.
Abstract
Analyzing user messages in social media can measure different population characteristics, including public health measures. For example, recent work has correlated Twitter messages with influenza rates in the United States; but this has largely been the extent of mining Twitter for public health. In this work, we consider a broader range of public health applications for Twitter. We apply the recently introduced Ailment Topic Aspect Model to over one and a half million health related tweets and discover mentions of over a dozen ailments, including allergies, obesity and insomnia. We introduce extensions to incorporate prior knowledge into this model and apply it to several tasks: tracking illnesses over times (syndromic surveillance), measuring behavioral risk factors, localizing illnesses by geographic region, and analyzing symptoms and medication usage. We show quantitative correlations with public health data and qualitative evaluations of model output. Our results suggest that Twitter has broad applicability for public health research.

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References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Latent dirichlet allocation

TL;DR: This work proposes a generative model for text and other collections of discrete data that generalizes or improves on several previous models including naive Bayes/unigram, mixture of unigrams, and Hofmann's aspect model.
Proceedings Article

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TL;DR: This paper proposed a generative model for text and other collections of discrete data that generalizes or improves on several previous models including naive Bayes/unigram, mixture of unigrams, and Hof-mann's aspect model, also known as probabilistic latent semantic indexing (pLSI).
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Proceedings ArticleDOI

Earthquake shakes Twitter users: real-time event detection by social sensors

TL;DR: This paper investigates the real-time interaction of events such as earthquakes in Twitter and proposes an algorithm to monitor tweets and to detect a target event and produces a probabilistic spatiotemporal model for the target event that can find the center and the trajectory of the event location.
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Predicting Elections with Twitter: What 140 Characters Reveal about Political Sentiment

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