Enhancing Seasonal Influenza Surveillance: Topic Analysis of Widely Used Medicinal Drugs Using Twitter Data.
Journal:
Journal of medical Internet research
Published Date:
Sep 12, 2017
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Uptake of medicinal drugs (preventive or treatment) is among the approaches used to control disease outbreaks, and therefore, it is of vital importance to be aware of the counts or frequencies of most commonly used drugs and trending topics about these drugs from consumers for successful implementation of control measures. Traditional survey methods would have accomplished this study, but they are too costly in terms of resources needed, and they are subject to social desirability bias for topics discovery. Hence, there is a need to use alternative efficient means such as Twitter data and machine learning (ML) techniques.