Google Flu Trends: Smart Software in Action
October 2, 2015
i read “What We Can Learn from the Epic Failure of Google Flu Trends.” I like history. In grade school in the 1950s, there was not much talk about predicting the flu.
Flash forward to 2008. According to the write up:
In 2008, researchers from Google explored this [prediction based on users’ queries] potential, claiming that they could “nowcast” the flu based on people’s searches. The essential idea, published in a paper in Nature, was that when people are sick with the flu, many search for flu-related information on Google, providing almost instant signals of overall flu prevalence.
Then what? Failure. The write up reminded me:
GFT failed—and failed spectacularly—missing at the peak of the 2013 flu season by 140 percent. When Google quietly euthanized the program, called Google Flu Trends (GFT), it turned the poster child of big data into the poster child of the foibles of big data.
The point is that Big Data are going to be darned useful. I agree. For now I will temper my enthusiasm for Google’s beating death and IBM Watson curing cancer. I want to be conservative and get a flu shot.
Stephen E Arnold, October 2, 2015
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