Enhancing COVID-19 Epidemic Forecasting Accuracy by Combining Real-time and Historical Data from Multiple Internet-Based Sources: Analysis of Social Media Data, Online News Articles, and Search Queries

Li，Jingwei1,2; Huang，Wei3,4,5; Sia，Choon Ling2; Chen，Zhuo6,7; Wu，Tailai8; Wang，Qingnan1

2022-06-01

10.2196/35266

JMIR Public Health and Surveillance   影响因子和分区

2369-2960

Background: The SARS-COV-2 virus and its variants pose extraordinary challenges for public health worldwide. Timely and accurate forecasting of the COVID-19 epidemic is key to sustaining interventions and policies and efficient resource allocation. Internet-based data sources have shown great potential to supplement traditional infectious disease surveillance, and the combination of different Internet-based data sources has shown greater power to enhance epidemic forecasting accuracy than using a single Internet-based data source. However, existing methods incorporating multiple Internet-based data sources only used real-time data from these sources as exogenous inputs but did not take all the historical data into account. Moreover, the predictive power of different Internet-based data sources in providing early warning for COVID-19 outbreaks has not been fully explored. Objective: The main aim of our study is to explore whether combining real-time and historical data from multiple Internet-based sources could improve the COVID-19 forecasting accuracy over the existing baseline models. A secondary aim is to explore the COVID-19 forecasting timeliness based on different Internet-based data sources. Methods: We first used core terms and symptom-related keyword-based methods to extract COVID-19–related Internet-based data from December 21, 2019, to February 29, 2020. The Internet-based data we explored included 90,493,912 online news articles, 37,401,900 microblogs, and all the Baidu search query data during that period. We then proposed an autoregressive model with exogenous inputs, incorporating real-time and historical data from multiple Internet-based sources. Our proposed model was compared with baseline models, and all the models were tested during the first wave of COVID-19 epidemics in Hubei province and the rest of mainland China separately. We also used lagged Pearson correlations for COVID-19 forecasting timeliness analysis. Results: Our proposed model achieved the highest accuracy in all 5 accuracy measures, compared with all the baseline models of both Hubei province and the rest of mainland China. In mainland China, except for Hubei, the COVID-19 epidemic forecasting accuracy differences between our proposed model (model i) and all the other baseline models were statistically significant (model 1, t=–8.722, P<.001; model 2, t=–5.000, P<.001, model 3, t=–1.882, P=.06; model 4, t=–4.644, P<.001; model 5, t=–4.488, P<.001). In Hubei province, our proposed model's forecasting accuracy improved significantly compared with the baseline model using historical new confirmed COVID-19 case counts only (model 1, t=–1.732, P=.09). Our results also showed that Internet-based sources could provide a 2- to 6-day earlier warning for COVID-19 outbreaks. Conclusions: Our approach incorporating real-time and historical data from multiple Internet-based sources could improve forecasting accuracy for epidemics of COVID-19 and its variants, which may help improve public health agencies' interventions and resource allocation in mitigating and controlling new waves of COVID-19 or other relevant epidemics.

autoregression model COVID 19 disease surveillance epidemic forecasting infectious disease epidemiology online news SARS-CoV-2 search query social medial

英语

通讯

2-s2.0-85132455883

Scopus

1.School of Management,Xi’an Jiaotong University,Xi'an,China
2.Department of Information Systems,City University of Hong Kong,Hong Kong
3.National Center for Applied Mathematics Shenzhen,Shenzhen,China
4.College of Business,Southern University of Science and Technology,Shenzhen,China
5.Department of Information Systems and Intelligent Business,School of Management,Xi’an Jiaotong University,Xi'an,China
6.College of Public Health,University of Georgia,Athens,United States
7.School of Economics,University of Nottingham Ningbo China,Ningbo,China
8.School of Medicine and Health Management,Tongji Medical College,Huazhong University of Science and Technology,Wuhan,China

Li，Jingwei,Huang，Wei,Sia，Choon Ling,et al. Enhancing COVID-19 Epidemic Forecasting Accuracy by Combining Real-time and Historical Data from Multiple Internet-Based Sources: Analysis of Social Media Data, Online News Articles, and Search Queries[J]. JMIR Public Health and Surveillance,2022,8(6).

Li，Jingwei,Huang，Wei,Sia，Choon Ling,Chen，Zhuo,Wu，Tailai,&Wang，Qingnan.(2022).Enhancing COVID-19 Epidemic Forecasting Accuracy by Combining Real-time and Historical Data from Multiple Internet-Based Sources: Analysis of Social Media Data, Online News Articles, and Search Queries.JMIR Public Health and Surveillance,8(6).

Li，Jingwei,et al."Enhancing COVID-19 Epidemic Forecasting Accuracy by Combining Real-time and Historical Data from Multiple Internet-Based Sources: Analysis of Social Media Data, Online News Articles, and Search Queries".JMIR Public Health and Surveillance 8.6(2022).