Forecasting patient arrivals at emergency department using calendar and meteorological information

Overcrowding in emergency departments (EDs) is a serious problem in many countries. Accurate ED patient arrival forecasts can serve as a management baseline to better allocate ED personnel and medical resources. We combined calendar and meteorological information and used ten modern machine learning methods to forecast patient arrivals. For daily patient arrival forecasting, two feature selection methods are proposed. One uses kernel principal component analysis(KPCA) to reduce the dimensionality of all of the features, and the other is to use the maximal information coefficient(MIC) method to select the features related to the daily data first and then perform KPCA dimensionality reduction. The current study focuses on a public hospital ED in Hefei, China. We used the data November 1, 2019 to August 31, 2020 for model training; and patient arrival data September 1, 2020 to November 31, 2020 for model validation. The results show that for hourly patient arrival forecasting, each machine learning model has better forecasting results than the traditional autoRegressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model, especially long short-term memory (LSTM) model. For daily patient arrival forecasting, the feature selection method based on MIC-KPCA has a better forecasting effect, and the simpler models are better than the ensemble models. The method we proposed could be used for better planning of ED personnel resources.