An Application of Convolutional Neural Network-Long Short-Term Memory Model for Service Demand Forecasting

Abstract

The medical services are very important requirement for being healthy human. In order to ensure the availability of resources for the medicine needed, the most hospital makes an service demand estimation by forecasting a number of patients to provide the sufficient medical services. Therefore, the accurately forecast a number of patients would be valuable knowledge for managing. This work proposed the CNN-LSTM model, which was a combination of CNN and LSTM, to forecast the number of patients who used hospital services. The CNN model was used to interpret, and extract the features from the input data. Then, it was provided this information to the LSTM model for interpreting and making a forecast. The CNN-LSTM models were applied to forecast on the two datasets. The results indicated that CNN-LSTM model made reliable forecasting. This work measured the model performnace by calculating RMSE and MAE value. The result showed RMSE and MAE of the models were very low in all experiments. Forecasting the number of patients can help the hospital to estimate the service demand, make a better policy for managing the medical resources on demand, and improve the efficiency of medical services for the future.