Using COVID-19 Vaccine Attitudes on Twitter to Improve Vaccine Uptake Forecast Models in the United States: Infodemiology Study of Tweets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a global effort to develop vaccines that protect against COVID-19. Individuals who are fully vaccinated are far less likely to contract and therefore transmit the virus to others. Researchers have found that the internet and social media both play a role in shaping personal choices about vaccinations. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to determine whether supplementing COVID-19 vaccine uptake forecast models with the attitudes found in tweets improves over baseline models that only use historical vaccination data. METHODS: Daily COVID-19 vaccination data at the county level was collected for the January 2021 to May 2021 study period. Twitter's streaming application programming interface was used to collect COVID-19 vaccine tweets during this same period. Several autoregressive integrated moving average models were executed to predict the vaccine uptake rate using only historical data (baseline autoregressive integrated moving average) and individual Twitter-derived features (autoregressive integrated moving average exogenous variable model). RESULTS: In this study, we found that supplementing baseline forecast models with both historical vaccination data and COVID-19 vaccine attitudes found in tweets reduced root mean square error by as much as 83%. CONCLUSIONS: Developing a predictive tool for vaccination uptake in the United States will empower public health researchers and decisionmakers to design targeted vaccination campaigns in hopes of achieving the vaccination threshold required for the United States to reach widespread population protection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".