Length of Stay Prediction Model of Indoor Patients Based on Light Gradient Boosting Machine

The influx of hospital patients has become common in recent years. Hospital management departments need to redeploy healthcare resources to meet the massive medical needs of patients. In this process, the hospital length of stay (LOS) of different patients is a crucial reference to the management department. Therefore, building a model to predict LOS is of great significance. Five machine learning (ML) algorithms named Lasso regression (LR), ridge regression (RR), random forest regression (RFR), light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM), and extreme gradient boosting regression (XGBR) and six feature encoding methods named label encoding, count encoding, one-hot encoding, target encoding, leave-one-out encoding, and the proposed encoding method are used to construct the regression prediction model. The Scikit-Learn toolbox on the Python platform builds the prediction model. The input is the dataset named Hospital Inpatient Discharges (SPARCS De-Identified) 2017 with 2343569 instances provided by the New York State Department of Health verify the model after removing 2.2% of the missing data, and the model ultimately uses mean squared error (MSE) and coefficient of determination (R ²) as the performance measurement. The results show that the model with the LightGBM algorithm and the proposed encoding method has the best R ² (96.0%) and MSE score (2.231).