Social Media Analytics for Dengue Monitoring in Malaysia

Social Media provides the ability to have preventative and reactive information widely available thus enabling the detection of public healthcare problems such as disease outbreaks at an early stage. Identifying public opinions about dengue fever will be an interesting point of reference to understand the sentiments shared by people. The aim of this paper is to study how Malaysians are actually tweeting and reacting to dengue related information. The research methodology includes data collection from social media, specifically Twitter, pre-processing, feature extraction and application of topic modelling techniques to determine the topics that are shared in tweets related to dengue information. This paper shows the preliminary results obtained from the data analysis which enhances our understanding about dengue related tweets and the users’ preferences. Since using social media has become a part of daily routine for most of the Malaysians living in urban areas, it is a timely call to explore social media as a potential tool to disseminate real-time information about dengue monitoring and prevention.