Investigating Twitter as a Source for Studying Behavioral Responses to Epidemics

Recent studies have shown an ability to track influenza rates from Twitter since Twitter users tweet illnesses (“i am home sick with the flu”). However, users may also tweet concerned awareness of illness (“don’t want to get sick, need a flu shot”). Identifying these messages can support computational epidemic response models. We present preliminary results for mining concerned awareness of influenza tweets. We describe our data set construction and experiments with binary classification of data into influenza versus general messages and classification into concerned awareness and existing infection.