Multi-dimensional Features for Prediction with Tweets

With the rise of opioid abuse in the US, there has been a growth of overlapping hotspots for overdose-related and HIV-related deaths in Springfield, Boston, Fall River, New Bedford, and parts of Cape Cod. With a large part of population, including rural communities, active on social media, it is crucial that we leverage the predictive power of social media as a preventive measure. We explore the predictive power of micro-blogging social media website Twitter with respect to HIV new diagnosis rates per county. While trending work in Twitter NLP has focused on primarily text-based features, we show that multi-dimensional feature construction can significantly improve the predictive power of topic features alone with respect STI's (sexually transmitted infections). By multi-dimensional features, we mean leveraging not only the topical features (text) of a corpus, but also location-based information (counties) about the tweets in feature-construction. We develop novel text-location-based smoothing features to predict new diagnoses of HIV.