Forecasting emergency medical service call arrival rates
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We introduce a new method for forecasting emergency call arrival rates that combines integer-valued time series models with a dynamic latent factor structure. Covariate information is captured via simple constraints on the factor loadings. We directly model the count-valued arrivals per hour, rather than using an artificial assumption of normality. This is crucial for the emergency medical service context, in which the volume of calls may be very low. Smoothing splines are used in estimating the factor levels and loadings to improve long-term forecasts. We impose time series structure at the hourly level, rather than at the daily level, capturing the fine-scale dependence in addition to the long-term structure. Our analysis considers all emergency priority calls received by Toronto EMS between January 2007 and December 2008 for which an ambulance was dispatched. Empirical results demonstrate significantly reduced error in forecasting call arrival volume. To quantify the impact of reduced forecast errors, we design a queueing model simulation that approximates the dynamics of an ambulance system. The results show better performance as the forecasting method improves. This notion of quantifying the operational impact of improved statistical procedures may be of independent interest.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it