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Predicting Ambulance Demand

File(s)
zz254.pdf (1.74 MB)
Permanent Link(s)
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/41181
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Cornell Theses and Dissertations
Author
Zhou, Zhengyi
Abstract

Predicting ambulance demand accurately on a fine resolution in time (e.g., every hour) and space (e.g., every 1 km2 ) is critical for staff, fleet management and dynamic deployment. There are several challenges: although the dataset is typically large-scale, the number of observations per time period and locality is almost always zero. The demand arises from complex urban geography and exhibits complex spatio-temporal patterns, both of which we need to capture and exploit. We propose three new methods to address these challenges, and provide spatio-temporal predictions for Toronto, Canada and Melbourne, Australia. First, we introduce a Bayesian time-varying Gaussian mixture model. We fix the mixture component distributions across time, while representing the spatiotemporal dynamics through time-varying mixture weights. We constrain the weights to capture weekly seasonality, and apply autoregressive priors on them to model location-specific patterns. Second, we propose a spatio-temporal kernel density estimator. We weight the spatial kernel of each historical observation by its informativeness to the current predictive task. We construct spatio-temporal weight functions to incorporate various temporal and spatial patterns in ambulance demand. Third, we propose a kernel warping method to incorporate complex spatial features. For each prediction we build a kernel density estimator on a sparse set of most similar data (labeled data), and warp these kernels to a larger set of past data regardless of labels (point cloud). The point cloud represents boundaries, neighborhoods, and road networks. Kernel warping can be interpreted as a regularization and a Bayesian prior imposed for spatial features. We show that these methods give much higher statistical predictive accuracy, and reduce error in predicting EMS operational performance by as much as two-thirds compared to the industry practice.

Date Issued
2015-08-17
Keywords
emergency medical services
•
spatio-temporal point process
•
data mining
Committee Chair
Matteson, David
Committee Member
Guckenheimer, John Mark
Woodard, Dawn B.
Degree Discipline
Applied Mathematics
Degree Name
Ph. D., Applied Mathematics
Degree Level
Doctor of Philosophy
Type
dissertation or thesis

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