Why Big Data Missed the Early Warning Signs of Ebola

/why_big_data_missed_the_early_warning_s

  • Why Big Data Missed the Early Warning Signs of Ebola

    http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/26/why_big_data_missed_the_early_warning_signs_of_ebola

    Merci à @freakonometrics d’avoir signalé cet article sur Twitter

    ith the Centers for Disease Control now forecasting up to 1.4 million new infections from the current Ebola outbreak, what could “big data” do to help us identify the earliest warnings of future outbreaks and track the movements of the current outbreak in realtime? It turns out that monitoring the spread of Ebola can teach us a lot about what we missed — and how data mining, translation, and the non-Western world can help to provide better early warning tools.

    Earlier this month, Harvard’s HealthMap service made world headlines for monitoring early mentions of the current Ebola outbreak on March 14, 2014, “nine days before the World Health Organization formally announced the epidemic,” and issuing its first alert on March 19. Much of the coverage of HealthMap’s success has emphasized that its early warning came from using massive computing power to sift out early indicators from millions of social media posts and other informal media.

    #ebola #statistics #big_data

    • By the time HealthMap monitored its very first report, the Guinean government had actually already announced the outbreak and notified the WHO.

      cf http://seenthis.net/messages/286853#message286960 et http://seenthis.net/messages/287766

      et sur l’impasse de #GDELT (l’auteur de l’article, Kalev H. Leetaru, étant le créateur de cette base de données) :

      Part of the problem is that the majority of media in Guinea is not published in English, while most monitoring systems today emphasize English-language material. The GDELT Project attempts to monitor and translate a cross-section of the world’s news media each day, yet it is not capable of translating 100 percent of global news coverage. It turns out that GDELT actually monitored the initial discussion of Dr. Keita’s press conference on March 13 and detected a surge in domestic coverage beginning on March 14, the day HealthMap flagged the first media mention. The problem is that all of this media coverage was in French — and was not among the French material that GDELT was able to translate those days.