Metaheuristic Approaches Integrated with ANN in Forecasting Daily Emergency Department Visits

The overall service quality level of Emergency Departments (EDs) can be improved by accurate forecasting of patient visits. Accordingly, this study aims to evaluate the use of three metaheuristic approaches integrated with Artificial Neural Network (ANN) in forecasting daily ED visits. To do this, five performance measures are used for evaluating the accuracy of the proposed approaches, including Bayesian ANN, Genetic Algorithm-based ANN (GA-ANN), and Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm-based ANN (PSO-ANN). The outputs of this study show that the PSO-ANN model provides the most dominant performance in both the training and testing process. The lowest error is obtained with a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 6.3%, Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 42.797, Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 2499.340, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 49.933, and R-squared (R2) of 0.824 on the training dataset. The lowest error with an MAPE of 6.0%, MAE of 40.888, MSE of 2839.998, RMSE of 53.292, and R2 of 0.791 is also obtained on the testing process.