Google Flu Trends Gets A Brand New Engine

According to this blog post, Google has improved the accuracy of the software model it uses to estimate the spread of the flu so that it is easier to respond to outbreaks.

The original model performed surprisingly well despite its simplicity. It was retrained just once per year, and typically used only the 50 to 300 queries that produced the best estimates for prior seasons. We then left it to perform through the new season and evaluated it at the end. It didn’t use the official CDC data for estimation during the season—only in the initial training.

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