Predicting Hospital Admission for Emergency Department Patients: A Machine Learning Approach

The objective of this study was to establish a machine learning model and to evaluate its predictive capability of admission to the hospital. This observational retrospective study included 3204 emergency department visits to a public tertiary care hospital in Greece from 14 March to 4 May 2019. We investigated biochemical markers and coagulation tests that are routinely checked in patients visiting the Emergency Department (ED) in relation to the ED outcome (admission or discharge). Among the most popular classification techniques of the scikit-learn library through a 10-fold cross-validation approach, a GaussianNB model outperformed other models with respect to the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve.