IJERPH, Vol. 16, Pages 3201: The Validity of Google Trends Search Volumes for Behavioral Forecasting of National Suicide Rates in Ireland

IJERPH, Vol. 16, Pages 3201: The Validity of Google Trends Search Volumes for Behavioral Forecasting of National Suicide Rates in Ireland International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health doi: 10.3390/ijerph16173201 Authors: Joana M. Barros Ruth Melia Kady Francis John Bogue Mary O’Sullivan Karen Young Rebecca A. Bernert Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann Jim Duggan Annual suicide figures are critical in identifying trends and guiding research, yet challenges arising from significant lags in reporting can delay and complicate real-time interventions. In this paper, we utilized Google Trends search volumes for behavioral forecasting of national suicide rates in Ireland between 2004 and 2015. Official suicide rates are recorded by the Central Statistics Office in Ireland. While similar investigations using Google trends data have been carried out in other jurisdictions (e.g., United Kingdom, United Stated of America), such research had not yet been completed in Ireland. We compiled a collection of suicide- and depression-related search terms suggested by Google Trends and manually sourced from the literature. Monthly search rate terms at different lags were compared with suicide occurrences to determine the degree of correlation. Following two approaches based on vector autoregression and neural network autoregression, we achieved mean absolute error values between 4.14 and 9.61 when incorporating search query data, with the highest performance...
Source: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Article Source Type: research