A Temporal Fusion Transformer for Long-Term Explainable Prediction of Emergency Department Overcrowding

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Emergency Departments (EDs) are a fundamental element of the Portuguese National Health Service, serving as an entry point for users with diverse and very serious medical problems. Due to the inherent characteristics of the ED, forecasting the number of patients using the services is particularly challenging. And a mismatch between the affluence and the number of medical professionals can lead to a decrease in the quality of the services provided and create problems that have repercussions for the entire hospital, with the requisition of health care workers from other departments and the postponement of surgeries. ED overcrowding is driven, in part, by non-urgent patients, that resort to emergency services despite not having a medical emergency and which represent almost half of the total number of daily patients. This paper describes a novel deep learning architecture, the Temporal Fusion Transformer, that uses calendar and time-series covariates to forecast prediction intervals and point predictions for a 4 week period. We have concluded that patient volume can be forecasted with a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 5.91% for Portugal’s Health Regional Areas (HRA) and a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 84.4102 people/day. The paper shows empirical evidence supporting the use of a multivariate approach with static and time-series covariates while surpassing other models commonly found in the literature.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMachine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases
Subtitle of host publicationInternational Workshops of ECML PKDD 2022, Grenoble, France, September 19–23, 2022, Proceedings, Part I
EditorsIrena Koprinska, Paolo Mignone, Riccardo Guidotti, Szymon Jaroszewicz, Holger Fröning, Francesco Gullo, Pedro M. Ferreira, Damian Roqueiro, Gaia Ceddia, Slawomir Nowaczyk, João Gama, Rita Ribeiro, Ricard Gavaldà, Elio Masciari, Zbigniew Ras, Ettore Ritacco, Francesca Naretto, Andreas Theissler, Przemyslaw Biecek, Wouter Verbeke, Gregor Schiele, Franz Pernkopf, Michaela Blott, Ilaria Bordino, Ivan Luciano Danesi, Giovanni Ponti, Lorenzo Severini, Annalisa Appice, Giuseppina Andresini, Ibéria Medeiros, Guilherme Graça, Lee Cooper, Naghmeh Ghazaleh, Jonas Richiardi, Diego Saldana, Konstantinos Sechidis, Arif Canakoglu, Sara Pido, Pietro Pinoli, Albert Bifet, Sepideh Pashami
Place of PublicationCham
PublisherSpringer
Pages71-88
Number of pages18
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-031-23618-1
ISBN (Print)978-3-031-23617-4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
EventWorkshops on SoGood, NFMCP, XKDD, UMOD, ITEM, MIDAS, MLCS, MLBEM, PharML, DALS, IoT-PdM 2022, held in conjunction with the 21st Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2022 - Grenoble, France
Duration: 19 Sept 202223 Sept 2022

Publication series

NameCommunications in Computer and Information Science
PublisherSpringer
Volume1752 CCIS
ISSN (Print)1865-0929
ISSN (Electronic)1865-0937

Conference

ConferenceWorkshops on SoGood, NFMCP, XKDD, UMOD, ITEM, MIDAS, MLCS, MLBEM, PharML, DALS, IoT-PdM 2022, held in conjunction with the 21st Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2022
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityGrenoble
Period19/09/2223/09/22

Keywords

  • Emergency department
  • Explainable ML
  • Forecasting
  • Machine learning
  • Manchester triage system
  • National Health Service
  • Neural network
  • Temporal fusion transformer
  • Time series

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