Colloquium Talk
Shaoyang Ning, Williams College
Monday November 13, 2023 at 4PM
Rocky  312

Title: Using Google search data for localized flu tracking

Abstract: Big data from the Internet has great potential to track social and economic events at multiple geographical levels. Focusing on localized (regional, state-level) tracking the seasonal influenza epidemics within U.S., I will introduce a statistical model that efficiently combines publicly available Google search data at different geographical resolutions with traditional influenza surveillance data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Our method outperforms time-series-based influenza tracking methods. Our model is robust and easy to implement, with the flexibility to incorporate additional information from other sources and/or resolutions, making it generally applicable to tracking other social, economic or public health events (such as COVID-19) at the regional or local level.