Digital Epidemiology: Use of Digital Data Collected for Non-epidemiological Purposes in Epidemiological Studies

Park, Hyeoun-Ae; Jung, Hyesil; On, Jeongah; Park, Seul Ki; Kang, Hannah

Since the data sources and analytic methods of digital epidemiology can be different from those of traditional epidemiology, we included data sources and analytic methods as variables. We created a general descriptive classification of these variables. First, we examined the full text of the articles, and extracted the data sources and analytical methods. Next, we identified and categorized data sources and analytic methods. Then, we classified the articles using these categories. We classified data sources into the following eight categories: web search query (e.g., Google, Baidu), social media post (e.g., Twitter, blog), web portal post (e.g., HealthMap, proMED), webpage access log (e.g., page views of the National Travel Health Network and Centre and Wikipedia views), image (e.g., Pinterest), mobile phone network data, global positioning system (GPS), and others (drone/balloon, meteorological data, and call center data). We classified analytical methods into the following four categories: descriptive analyses (e.g., relative search volume and number of page views), correlation analyses (e.g., Pearson correlation coefficient, Spearman rank correlation coefficient, and