Web data mining for public health purposes
It addresses public health monitoring for policymakers and researchers, but appears incremental as it builds on existing web data mining methods.
This thesis explores using web data mining to predict public health events like disease incidence and vaccination activity, and develops new approaches and applications for monitoring public health.
For a long time, public health events, such as disease incidence or vaccination activity, have been monitored to keep track of the health status of the population, allowing to evaluate the effect of public health initiatives and to decide where resources for improving public health are best spent. This thesis investigates the use of web data mining for public health monitoring, and makes contributions in the following two areas: New approaches for predicting public health events from web mined data, and novel applications of web mined data for public health monitoring.