Detecting epidemic tendency by mining search logs

We consider the problem of detecting epidemic tendency by mining search logs. We propose an algorithm based on click-through information to select epidemic related queries/terms. We adopt linear regression to model epidemic occurrences and frequencies of epidemic related terms (ERTs) in search logs. The results show our algorithm is effective in finding ERTs which obtain a high correlation value with epidemic occurrences. We also find the proposed method performs better when combining different ERTs than using single ERT.