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  1. The large volume of geotagged Twitter streaming data on flu epidemics provides chances for researchers to explore, model, and predict the trends of flu cases in a timely manner. However, the explosive growth of data from social media makes data sampling a natural choice. In this paper, we develop a method for influenza prediction based on the real-time tweet data from social media, and this method ensures real-time prediction and is applicable to sampling data. Specifically, we first simulate the sampling process of flu tweets, and then develop a specific partial differential equation (PDE) model to characterize and predict the aggregated flu tweet volumes. Our PDE model incorporates the effects of flu spreading, flu recovery, and active human interventions for reducing flu. Our extensive simulation results show that this PDE model can almost eliminate the data reduction effects from the sampling process: It requires lesser historical data but achieves stronger prediction results with a relative accuracy of over 90% on the 1% sampling data. Even for the more aggressive data sampling ratios such as 0.1% and 0.01% sampling, our model is still able to achieve relative accuracies of 85% and 83%, respectively. These promising results highlight the ability of our mechanistic PDE model in predicting temporal–spatial patterns of flu trends even in the scenario of small sampling Twitter data. 
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  2. Social media embed rich but noisy signals of physical locations of their users. Accurately inferring a user's location can significantly improve the user's experience on the social media and enable the development of new location-based applications. This paper proposes a novel community-based approach for predicting the location of a user by using communities in the egonet of the user. We further propose both geographical proximity and structural proximity metrics to profile communities in the ego-net of a user, and then evaluate the effectiveness of each individual metric on real social media data. We discover that geographical proximity metrics, such as average/median haversine distance and community closeness, are strong indicators of a good community for geotagging. In addition, structural proximity metric conductance performs comparable to geographical proximity metrics while triangle participation ratio and internal density are weak location indicators. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort to infer the physical location of a user from the perspective of latent communities in the user's ego-net. 
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