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Estimating county health statistics with twitter

Published: 26 April 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Understanding the relationships among environment, behavior, and health is a core concern of public health researchers. While a number of recent studies have investigated the use of social media to track infectious diseases such as influenza, little work has been done to determine if other health concerns can be inferred. In this paper, we present a large-scale study of 27 health-related statistics, including obesity, health insurance coverage, access to healthy foods, and teen birth rates. We perform a linguistic analysis of the Twitter activity in the top 100 most populous counties in the U.S., and find a significant correlation with 6 of the 27 health statistics. When compared to traditional models based on demographic variables alone, we find that augmenting models with Twitter-derived information improves predictive accuracy for 20 of 27 statistics, suggesting that this new methodology can complement existing approaches.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2014
4206 pages
ISBN:9781450324731
DOI:10.1145/2556288
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 26 April 2014

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Author Tags

  1. natural language processing
  2. public health
  3. social media

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CHI '14
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CHI '14: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 26 - May 1, 2014
Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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CHI '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 465 of 2,043 submissions, 23%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Mental-LLMProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36435408:1(1-32)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Observer Effect in Social Media UseProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642078(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Robust language-based mental health assessments in time and space through social medianpj Digital Medicine10.1038/s41746-024-01100-07:1Online publication date: 2-May-2024
  • (2023)Deep Learning-Based Sentiment and Stance Analysis of Tweets About VaccinationInternational Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems10.4018/IJSWIS.33386519:1(1-18)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2023
  • (2023)How Visual Aesthetics and Calorie Density Predict Food Image Popularity on Instagram: A Computer Vision AnalysisHealth Communication10.1080/10410236.2023.217563539:3(577-591)Online publication date: 9-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Inflation and the war in Ukraine: Evidence using impulse response functions on economic indicators and Twitter sentimentResearch in International Business and Finance10.1016/j.ribaf.2023.10204466(102044)Online publication date: Oct-2023
  • (2023)Filling in the White Space: Spatial Interpolation with Gaussian Processes and Social Media DataCurrent Research in Ecological and Social Psychology10.1016/j.cresp.2023.100159(100159)Online publication date: Oct-2023
  • (2023)Leaving traces behind: Using social media digital trace data to study adolescent wellbeingComputers in Human Behavior Reports10.1016/j.chbr.2023.10028110(100281)Online publication date: May-2023
  • (2023)Predicting Community Health Through Heterogeneous Social NetworksSN Computer Science10.1007/s42979-023-01718-z4:3Online publication date: 21-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Evaluating machine learning technologies for food computing from a data set perspectiveMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-023-16513-483:11(32041-32068)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2023
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