Forecasting the Potential Number of Influenza-like Illness Cases by Fusing Internet Public Opinion

As influenza viruses mutate rapidly, a prediction model for potential outbreaks of influenza-like illnesses helps detect the spread of the illnesses in real time. In order to create a better prediction model, in this study, in addition to using the traditional hydrological and atmospheric data, features, such as popular search keywords on Google Trends, public holiday information, population density, air quality indices, and the numbers of COVID-19 confirmed cases, were also used to train the model in this research. Furthermore, Random Forest and XGBoost were combined and used in the proposed prediction model to increase the prediction accuracy. The training data used in this research were the historical data taken from 2016 to 2021. In our experiments, different combinations of features were tested. The results show that features, such as popular search keywords on Google Trends, the numbers of COVID-19 confirmed cases, and air quality indices can improve the outcome of the prediction model. The evaluation results showed that the error rate between the predicted results and the actual number of influenza-like cases form Week 15 to Week 18 fell to less than 5%. The outbreak of COVID-19 in Taiwan began in Week 19 and resulted in a sharp rise in the number of clinic or hospital visits by patients of influenza-like illnesses. After that, from Week 21 to Week 26, the error rate between the predicted and actual numbers of influenza-like cases in the later period dropped down to 13%. It can be confirmed from the actual experimental results in this research that the use of the ensemble learning prediction model proposed in this research can accurately predict the trend of influenza-like cases.