New tool for the early detection of public health threats from Twitter data: epitweetr
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Friday, October 2, 2020
The R-based tool epitweetrallows users to automatically monitor trends of tweets by time, place and topic, with the aim of detecting public health threats early through signals, such as an unusual increase in the number of tweets.
Key Points:
- The R-based tool epitweetrallows users to automatically monitor trends of tweets by time, place and topic, with the aim of detecting public health threats early through signals, such as an unusual increase in the number of tweets.
- It was designed to support public health experts with the early detection of threats from infectious diseases but can be extended to all hazards and other fields of study by modifying the topics and keywords.
- The epitweetr package includes an interactive web application (based on the R package Shiny) with five pages:
To make epitweetr as widely available as possible, R was chosen as the computing platform.
- epitweetr can be downloaded free of charge from the ECDC website, the CRAN website (for CRAN users) or GitHub (for GitHub users).