Abstract
This work innovated mathematical epidemiology concepts to create a model used to identify critical social issues. A compartmental SEI (acronym for Susceptible Exposed Infected) model was developed to investigate the flow of issues in social media. The basic reproduction number \(R_0\), the number of secondary cases resulting from the introduction of an index case into an otherwise uninfected population, was derived for the model. Any social issue with \(R_0\) greater than one was defined to be a critical issue. The model was evaluated under about 4.7 million tweets from Nigeria streamed over a six-month period and \(R_0\) was estimated for each of the top twenty social phenomena in the dataset. Security (\(R_0 = 30.784\)), Ebola (\(R_0 = 51.949\)), and Transport System (\(R_0 = 4.166\)) were found to be critical issues in Nigeria using this methodology.
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Akinwumi, S.M. (2015). A Mathematical Epidemiology Approach for Identifying Critical Issues in Social Media. In: Agarwal, N., Xu, K., Osgood, N. (eds) Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction. SBP 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9021. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16268-3_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16268-3_25
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