Every year, millions of patients use emergency department facilities across the nation. The resources of these facilities have to be managed properly—if there is a large influx of patients at any given time, the staff and the available rooms should be increased accordingly. The mismatch between resources and patient influx could lead to wasted money and suboptimal care.
In this context, we introduce our example modeling task —predicting discharge statuses for patients presenting to the emergency room. The discharge status refers to whether patients are admitted to the hospital or sent home. Usually, the more serious cases are admitted to the hospital. Therefore, we are attempting to predict the outcome of the ED visit early on in the patient stay.
With such a model, the workflow of the hospital...