FluCastRisk assessment and Forecast of

seasonal flu in real time

YIXIN HU, SANDEEP SHANTHARAM AND LASIFU TA

Data Sciences & Analytics Group, Computational & Statistical Analytics Division, National Security Directorate

PNNL-SA-104651

FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Why Flu?

Infectious respiratory disease causing Seasonal Epidemic

$71-167 billion per year spent on “Flu” in the U.S.

Transmission rate between humans is high

Keywords of flu symptoms are expressed on Social Media

Rich and Varied data sources for disease analysis

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Need for Mobile App

Target Customers

- Epidemiologists – primary

- Transport / School / Company Officials – secondary

Customer Needs

- Decrease time to action

- Enhance collaboration

- Access to varied data sources

- Targeted flu news

- Mobile analytics app

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Flu Forecast

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Flu Forecast – Approach

Prediction with data from historical flu cases, weather and social media.

ARIMA Model for flu prediction with Time-Series data.

Forecasting three weeks ahead of CDC.

Estimated flu cases with accuracy about 90%

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Flu Forecast – Approach

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H1N1

FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Flu Forecast – Implementation

Automated data retrieval from CDC and Programmatically access

weather and twitter data from NOAA and Twitter

Flask web framework for backend REST API with Mongo Database

suited for time series data

Jquery Mobile to build the HTML5 App

PhoneGap framework for transformation

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Flu Forecast – UX Design

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Flu Forecast – UX Design

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Data Sharing

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Data Sharing – Approach

Information Sharing and Collaboration between Epidemiologists

Sharing data within a group of trusted individuals

Communication between the analysts over E-mail

Sharing public domain information to Social Network

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Data Sharing – Implementation

Sharing the screenshot of the active window and data in tabular form

Information sharing through the phone’s email application

Ability to create groups with the contacts on the analyst’s phone

Sharing public level data to Social Networks like Facebook, Twitter

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Data Sharing – UX Design

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Flu Stream

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Flu Stream – Approach

News stream from RSS feeds of flu related websites like CDC and WHO

Twitter real-time stream with geo-location for tweets related to Flu

Stay updated with the news from the RSS and Twitter in real time

Share the News article and Tweets to Social Network

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Flu Stream – Implementation

Flu Stream is updated every hour for both RSS and Twitter Stream

Items in News stream and Twitter stream are geotagged to allow analysts

identify the location associated

Geotagging by the list of keywords based on states and usage of natural

language processing to tokenize the keywords

Sharing to all third party apps with the phones in-built share function

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Flu Stream – UX Design

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Flu Stream – UX Design

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Outbreak Alert

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Outbreak Alert – Approach

Real-time monitoring of Twitter stream for the flu symptom mentions

Exponential Smoothing Model used in calculating the threshold value

Push Notification to the analyst, for possible outbreaks on a daily basis

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Outbreak Alert – Approach

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H1N1

FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Outbreak Alert – Implementation

Live data stream from twitter allows for real-time analysis

Tweets are automatically geotagged as the data is streamed

Push notification to the analyst based on the twitter mentions being

higher than threshold value for high risk

Push Notification to the device with related information gathered from

twitter for Outbreak Conditions

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Outbreak Alert – UX Design

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Competition

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Benefit

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FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Future Direction

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Option for robust prediction models

Offline access to the app

Subtyping Flu

Data source from multiple social networks

Better Twitter Data Analysis

Analyst reporting

FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Acknowledgement

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Technical Staff

Harisson, Joshua J

Dowling, Chase P

Henry, Michael J

Franklin, Lyndsey R

Lancaster, Mary

Managerial Staff

Spence, Christine N

Noonan, Christine F

Cowley, Wendy E

Corley, Courtney D

Didier, Brett T

FluCast - Mobile App for Risk and Forecast of Flu

Yixin Hu – Data Analyst

Columbia University

Android Team One

Lasifu Ta – UX Designer/ Front-end

University of Washington

Sandeep Shantharam – Developer

Indiana University Purdue University,

Indianapolis

Thank you!

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