Publications by Author: Ryan Kennedy

While digital trace data from sources like search engines hold enormous potential for tracking and understanding human behavior, these streams of data lack information about the actual experiences of those individuals generating the data. Moreover, most current methods ignore or under-utilize human processing capabilities that allow humans to solve problems not yet solvable by computers (human computation). We demonstrate how behavioral research, linking digital and real-world behavior, along with human computation, can be utilized to improve the performance of studies using digital data streams. This study looks at the use of search data to track prevalence of Influenza-Like Illness (ILI). We build a behavioral model of flu search based on survey data linked to users’ online browsing data. We then utilize human computation for classifying search strings. Leveraging these resources, we construct a tracking model of ILI prevalence that outperforms strong historical benchmarks using only a limited stream of search data and lends itself to tracking ILI in smaller geographic units. While this paper only addresses searches related to ILI, the method we describe has potential for tracking a broad set of phenomena in near real-time.

Large errors in flu prediction were largely avoidable, which offers lessons for the use of big data.

In February 2013, Google Flu Trends (GFT) made headlines but not for a reason that Google executives or the creators of the flu tracking system would have hoped. Nature reported that GFT was predicting more than double the proportion of doctor visits for influenza-like illness (ILI) than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which bases its estimates on surveillance reports from laboratories across the United States ( 1, 2). This happened despite the fact that GFT was built to predict CDC reports. Given that GFT is often held up as an exemplary use of big data ( 3, 4), what lessons can we draw from this error?

See also "Google Flu Trends Still Appears Sick: An Evaluation of the 2013‐2014 Flu Season"

 

WE THANK BRONIATOWSKI, Paul, and Dredze for giving us the opportunity to reemphasize the potential of big data and make the more obvious point that not all big data projects have the problems currently plaguing Google Flu Trends (GFT), nor are these problems inherent to the field in general.

See our original papers: "The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis," and "Google Flu Trends Still Appears Sick: An Evaluation of the 2013‐2014 Flu Season"