A general method for estimating the prevalence of Influenza-Like-Symptoms with Wikipedia data
Influenza is an acute respiratory seasonal disease that affects millions of people worldwide and causes thousands of deaths in Europe alone. Being able to estimate in a fast and reliable way the impact of an illness on a given country is essential to plan and organize effective countermeasures, which is now possible by leveraging unconventional data sources like web searches and visits...
In this study, we show the feasibility of exploiting information about Wikipedia’s page views of a selected group of articles and machine learning models to obtain accurate estimates of influenza-like illnesses incidence in four