Abstract
It is important for public health officials to follow both the incidence of disease and the public’s perception of it, especially in the Internet-connected age. In the specific context of influenza, disease surveillance through social media has proven effective, but public awareness of influenza and its effects are not well understood. We build upon the existing Epstein model of coupled contagion with the aim of including modern media mechanisms for awareness transmission. Our agent-based model captures the unique effects of news media and social media on disease dynamics, and suggests potential areas for policy intervention to modulate the spread of the flu.
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Notes
- 1.
These descriptions are intended to provide insight into the motivation underlying these models. See https://bitbucket.org/mcsmith/awareness_abm for the full code that details all particularities of implementation.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge Dr. Mark Dredze for allowing us access to the HealthTweets awareness trends, and Dr. Joshua Epstein for helpful feedback.
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Smith, M.C., Broniatowski, D.A. (2016). Modeling Influenza by Modulating Flu Awareness. In: Xu, K., Reitter, D., Lee, D., Osgood, N. (eds) Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling. SBP-BRiMS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9708. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39931-7_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39931-7_25
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