Vaccine Hesitancy

 Researchers Can Predict Vaccine Hesitancy at Zip Code Level

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Maya Abu-Zahra, May 16, 2022

University of Southern California (USC) researchers have developed natural language processing (NLP) software that can forecast vaccine hesitancy in specific geographies in real time. The researchers said the system uses existing algorithms to process publicly available Twitter data, outperforming local and national survey data in reflecting public views on the COVID-19 vaccine at the zip code level. USC's Sara Melotte said the software furthers the goal of making such predictions on a community level. "We show that only the text tweet and hashtags are sufficient to predict zip code-level vaccine hesitancy with reasonable accuracy, even if the tweets are not all related to the COVID-19 pandemic." ... '