Title
Unsupervised public health event detection for epidemic intelligence
Abstract
Recent pandemics such as Swine Flu have caused concern for public health officials. Given the ever increasing pace at which infectious diseases can spread globally, officials must be prepared to react sooner and with greater epidemic intelligence gathering capabilities. However, state-of-the-art systems for Epidemic Intelligence have not kept the pace with the growing need for more robust public health event detection. In this paper, we propose a game-changing approach where public health events are detected in an unsupervised manner. We address the problems associated with adapting an unsupervised learner to the medical domain and in doing so, propose an approach which combines aspects from different feature-based event detection methods. We evaluate our approach with a real world dataset with respect to the quality of article clusters. Our results show that we are able to achieve a precision of 66% and a recall of 81% when evaluated using manually annotated, real-world data. This shows promising results for the use of such techniques in this new problem setting.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1145/1871437.1871753
CIKM
Keywords
Field
DocType
article cluster,unsupervised manner,public health official,different feature-based event detection,public health event,epidemic intelligence,robust public health event,unsupervised public health event,swine flu,unsupervised learner,game-changing approach,clustering,public health,infectious disease
Public health,Data science,Data mining,Pace,Computer science,Pandemic,Cluster analysis,Recall
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
14
0.93
10
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marco Fisichella18012.38
Avaré Stewart211110.56
Kerstin Denecke314023.57
Wolfgang Nejdl46633556.13