I apologize if this better belongs in r/learnprogramming or r/mlclass. I'm very new to machine learning and figured that a good way to learn would be to implement an agent that can predict illness spreading by using twitter. Right now, I don't even know how to actually determine if someone is sick from his/her tweet. Obviously, if someone uses the phrase 'sick of', he probably doesn't mean he is actually ill. But I'm sure there are plenty of other indicators that I'm unaware of. How would I or the program be able to discover these additional factors?
The closest thing I can think of is that I would train the program on hundreds of tweets that I would manually label as sick or not; it could then build up a probability model of words following 'sick' to determine if the tweet is actually about illness, but I have no idea how I can get the program to pick up on other patterns like preceding words or friends that also used 'sick' in their tweets without explicitly telling the program to look at those as well. I apologize for the stupid question, as I imagine this is probably a huge part of ML, but I couldn't find anything through google.
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