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When Google Got Flu Wrong
ananyo writes "When influenza hit early and hard in the United States this year, it quietly claimed an unacknowledged victim: one of the cutting-edge techniques being used to monitor the outbreak. A comparison with traditional surveillance data showed that Google Flu Trends, which estimates prevalence from flu-related Internet searches, had drastically overestimated peak flu levels. The glitch is no more than a temporary setback for a promising strategy, experts say, and Google is sure to refine its algorithms. But with flu-tracking techniques based on mining of web data and on social media taking off, Nature looks at how these potentially cheaper, faster methods measure up against traditional epidemiological surveillance networks." Crowdsourcing is often useful, but it seems to have limits.
Modern epidemics and pandemics are almost ALWAYS overestimated by those predicting them. In part, this is because those predicting them often have a vested interest in making them sound a scarier than they actually are. So you get a lot of this "The sky is falling! Weessa all gonna die! Give me more research money!" screaming from epidemiologists and those in related fields.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
the joke was "I opened the window and influenza"
Computer modeling is a powerful technology that should not be underestimated.
However, it should also not be overestimated.
When the "real world" has millions of convergent factors responsible for an event, computer models can sometimes capture a few thousand. Based on those, a simulation is created that suggests a certain outcome. But it may be using less than 1% of the necessary data.
This is like making architectural models out of child's blocks and then being surprised when the building falls down after it is eventually made. There are issues of scale in addition to data that can reveal periodistic or epicyclic patterns that cannot be modeled in a linear method.
Financial incentive? In science?
Well, yes. Scientists are people too, and they want the same thing most of us want: to put together enough of a money pile to leave the rat race adn go do what we want for a change, without having to make it profitable and thus bending it to the lowest common denominator (LCD).
Michael Crichton's State of Fear reveals this tendency in our media and science. Quite simply, fear sells. And what doesn't sell will not get funded, will not help your 401(k) swell, and will leave you an unethical but underpaid lab-drone while fools get the gold for preaching what people want to hear.
They should subtract out a factor based on how much the flu is being talking about in the media.
In short, a system that learns from abnormal circumstances will no longer work as well under normal circumstances. This year's flu outbreak didn't follow previous models, so Google's application of those models was inaccurate... but we'll blame Google for it anyway, and cast shame upon them for being so terribly wrong.
Of course, the article is much better, delving into other systems that also predict and monitor flu outbreaks, and why they were or were not correct. TFA is really about the difference between traditional reporting sources (as from doctors' offices) and newer data-mining approaches (harvesting from searches and Twitter).
Screw you, Slashdot.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Why stop there? Just arrest people for non-conforming behavior.
Anything but shopping, going to work, watching TV and loudly proclaiming "they hate us because of our freedom, liberty, peace, diversity, consumerism, sexual liberation and excellent shopping" is suspect.
If we round up these deviants, I think we can achieve Utopia within the decade.
This is probably because people will update their social media sites with claims of having the flu. If they actually had the flu odds are they would not have the strength to even do that.
The real flu is pretty terrible and people often think they have it when they have a minor cold.
"Good morning, gentlemen. What does the overnight Google search analysis show?"
"Well, there is the continued flu outbreak on the east coast, with the biggest concentration in Boston. There seems to be a ringworm outbreak in pets in the southwest, and our numbers show, and I caution you this is probably a 60% overestimate, the apparent nationwide removal of 3.8 million brains due to unspecified causes."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It's only a matter of time before a real flu epidemic rages though the world. The trick with flu is the balance between it's virulence and it's morbidity. Flu's that come by that are virulent AND overly morbid will burn out. People will die too fast to spread the disease. This is why there has been no world wide outbreak of Ebola... it kills so fast, it can't spread. A mild flu (low morbidity) can spread far and wide, because it doesn't kill the majority of its hosts, thus allowing them to pass the disease on. But eventually, you'll get another 1918 flu, that is easily transferred AND has high morbidity. When that happens, we'll be better prepared in that we have drugs like Tamiflu now, and also have antibiotics that stop secondary infections like pneumonia. Those will moderate the disease in the first world, but the third world will still have results like 1918. The flu will still only have a year to do its nasty business, as a vaccine will undoubtedly be developed and administered. But that takes a year to do and there is no good way to speed that up. So at some point, we'll get a scenario like the one portrayed in Contagion, which was an excellent film in my estimation, showing what a 1918-like flu epidemic would look like today. If you haven't seen it, you should. It shows how the government won't be there to help us in the short term at the very least, and why it is important to be able to be relatively safe when isolating yourself for a long period of time (up to a year)... Prepping isn't crazy... it's common sense.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
Google announces they're tracking the flu (hey everyone, come see a map that will tell you how bad the flu is in your area!), Larry Page announces he's offering free flu shots to all kids in the Bay Area, and Google announces it's launching a flu shot locator. Of course searches for "flu" and "influenza" are going to increase. That will throw off the accuracy of your model. What they're really measuring is this: "people who are thinking about the flu and proactively reaching out to learn more."
...when people regularly died from it?
0 1 - just my two bits
Of course the sensational news story of this past winter was the rampant outbreak of "flu" which suddenly has become one of the biggest health scares the world has ever seen.
Google needs a sensational hyperbole filter on their Internet scrapes, something to blow past the kind of rampant proliferation of "news" not based on fact or reality, but only reported to drive web hits or broadcasts has become common place these days. Some reporter goes to the ER of a hospital, sees a room pack of sniffling, coughing people in the middle of winter, and then declares there is a plague of epic proportions infecting America, which is then dutifully re-tweeted to the idiot masses.
First, its just Flu. While very young or very old might be prone to complications from flu, the vast majority of people getting flu WILL NOT DIE from it, so the fear and overreaction to flu is unwarranted.
Second, nothing has changed from, say, 20 years ago. There is no "rise" in flu infection rates, there is no epidemic. Flu isn't stronger or more powerful then it used to be. The only difference is the Internet which spread misinformation causing ignorant alarmists to jump to ridiculous conclusions. Was 2012-2013 record breaking for flu outbreak, or was it just the year that the social media reaction to an otherwise normal amount of flu infections reached epic proportions online?
People get sick and if you eat healthy and take your vitamins generally you can recover from it easily and quickly. I have survived 2 rounds of flu spreading through out my place of work without getting sick and I haven't even gotten the flu shot, I just up my vitamins and drink some more OJ when everyone else around me is coughing and sneezing their snot all over the place. However, I'd rather people just stay the fuck in bed when they are sick.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
The professionals will provide the usual range of predictions, creating a more-or-less gaussian distribution around the actual result, and then the media will self-select the ones on the highest part of the curve because that's what keeps people watching the news.
but apparently they have a whiz-bang hypochondria pandemic detector.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Personally I find the mania detector quite useful, and hope it can be used to expose other mass-illusions such as hybrid cars being positive for the environment and guns in school being a good thing. I know I won't need a flu shot, but I want to know how many crazy people I should prepare to disbelieve and avoid any given day.
Google Flu has never been used to officially declare a flu outbreak. It's a neat tool, and it has been successfully used in retrospective studies, but until it actually helps us prepare for a flu outbreak in ways above and beyond what traditional surveillance already does, it will continue to just be a neat tool and not a useful one. The same goes for the Twitter flu prediction models. These tools are cool, but unless people actually do things differently to prepare for an outbreak based on their predictions, they don't mean anything. Consider this question: If you were a public health professional and you knew about a flu outbreak 2 weeks earlier, what would you do differently? Encourage people to get vaccinated? Already being done. Shut down schools? You had better be damn sure. Warn local hospitals? You are kidding yourself if you think they are going to start bringing in extra staff in the hopes that your prediction was right. So really, what does that extra week or two get you?