Overview
Identify outbreaks from the comfort of your home.
Outbreak aims to address misinformation by extracting relevant information in news headlines and organizing this information in an accessible manner. By providing this information, users can determine where the disease is most prominent without having to read through numerous news articles.
Problem
Due to the pandemic, information about disease outbreaks is essential to remain safe. Fortunately, news articles provide information about COVID-19, but sifting through thousands of news articles poses a challenge for many.
Solution
Outbreak uses a combination of web scraping and unsupervised machine learning to capture news headlines and cluster them accordingly. Headlines are filtered based on location and manipulated to form a comprehensive map.
Platforms
The backend was created using Python ML libraries and AWS's Lambda service, while the frontend utilizes HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Open-Source
Our open-source platform makes it easy to check for updates and run the code yourself on your local machine.
BLOG
Check the articles below to gain a deeper understanding to the implementation behind Outbreak. Outbreak mainly uses clustering machine learning algorithms and web scraping through Python libraries as well as AWS compute power to provide the most optimal geographic map representing a specific keyword.
Using HTML Parsing to Extract News Headlines
Web scraping through hundreds of the most popular news sources and finding information about each pertinent article using Python libraries like Beautiful Soup.
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Determining COVID-19 Outbreaks Through Machine Learning
Using unsupervised clustering machine learning algorithms to find specific points of disease outbreaks depending on the information given by the news headline.
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Using Basemap and Geonamescache to Plot Clusters
Plotting the clustered data found from the ML algorithms onto a geographic map using libraries like Basemap and Geonamescache.
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Fast Processing
Outbreak allows for extremely quick processing so that individuals can search through specific keywords almost instantaneously.
Easily Accessible
Outbreak doesn’t require significant or comprehensive knowledge to operate and can be used with little to no instruction.
Flexible Input
Outbreak allows the user to input any keyword that they want to find trends for, regardless of whether it relates to diseases or not.
Machine Learning
Outbreak utilizes several clustering algorithms in order to identify distinct geographic locations based on the news headlines given.
Consistent Updates
Outbreak constantly updates its site to provide the most up-to-date trends on significant keywords like the coronavirus.
Importance
Outbreak provides current information about the state of relevant diseases in today’s society, including COVID-19.