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Google Flu Trends underestimates US flu outbreak

Google Flu Trends, an automated system using search query data to estimate flu activity, failed to predict the severity of the 2012-2013 US flu outbreak, underestimating the impact. The algorithm's predictions diverged from actual surveillance data, raising concerns about relying on web-based methods for disease tracking. The article reports the discrepancy as a failure of the model.

Organisation involved
Google
Product, system or model
Google Flu Trends
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This incident was imported from nature.com. Our additions to it — the structured fields, the translation, the checks against other reports — are published under the same licence.

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