Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Predicting Disease Outbreaks Using A Support Vector Machine Model, Nicolae Dragu

Senior Theses and Projects

The purpose of this research is to create an efficient way of detecting disease outbreaks from news articles using Support Vector Machines (SVM). An SVM is a supervised machine learning method used for classification and regression problems. The role of the SVM in this project is to “learn” to distinguish between news articles that may indicate a disease outbreak and those that do not.

A series of health-related articles from the World Health Organization is parsed using a Java program in order to create vectors for the SVM. Each such article thus results in a vector. A basic negation detection …