Title: Time-Series Adaptive Estimation of Vaccination Uptake Using Web Search Queries,
Abstract: Estimating vaccination uptake is an integral part of ensuring public health.
It was recently shown that vaccination uptake can be estimated automatically
from web data, instead of slowly collected clinical records or population
surveys. All prior work in this area assumes that features of vaccination
uptake collected from the web are temporally regular. We present the first ever
method to remove this assumption from vaccination uptake estimation: our method
dynamically adapts to temporal fluctuations in time series web data used to
estimate vaccination uptake. We show our method to outperform the state of the
art compared to competitive baselines that use not only web data but also
curated clinical data. This performance improvement is more pronounced for
vaccines whose uptake has been irregular due to negative media attention (HPV-1
and HPV-2), problems in vaccine supply (DiTeKiPol), and targeted at children of
12 years old (whose vaccination is more irregular compared to younger
children).