Assessing the impact of a health intervention via user-generated Internet content

• Autores: Vasileios Lampos, Elad Yom-Tov, Richard Pebody, Ingemar Cox
• Localización: Data mining and knowledge discovery, ISSN 1384-5810, Vol. 29, Nº 5, 2015, págs. 1434-1457
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Assessing the effect of a health-oriented intervention by traditional epidemiological methods is commonly based only on population segments that use healthcare services. Here we introduce a complementary framework for evaluating the impact of a targeted intervention, such as a vaccination campaign against an infectious disease, through a statistical analysis of user-generated content submitted on web platforms. Using supervised learning, we derive a nonlinear regression model for estimating the prevalence of a health event in a population from Internet data. This model is applied to identify control location groups that correlate historically with the areas, where a specific intervention campaign has taken place. We then determine the impact of the intervention by inferring a projection of the disease rates that could have emerged in the absence of a campaign. Our case study focuses on the influenza vaccination program that was launched in England during the 2013/14 season, and our observations consist of millions of geo-located search queries to the Bing search engine and posts on Twitter. The impact estimates derived from the application of the proposed statistical framework support conventional assessments of the campaign.