Bayesian spatio-temporal modelling and prediction of areal demands for ambulance services

Abstract

Careful planning of an ambulance service is critical to reduce response times to emergency calls and make assistance more effective. However, the demand for emergency services is highly variable, and good prediction of the number of future emergency calls, and their spatial and temporal distribution, is challenging. In this work, we propose a Bayesian approach to predict the number of emergency calls in future time periods for each zone of the served territory. The number of calls is described by a generalized linear mixed effects model, and inference, in terms of posterior predictive distributions, is obtained through Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation. Our approach is applied in a large city in Canada. The paper demonstrates that using a model for areal data provides good results in terms of predictive accuracy and allows flexibility in accounting for the main features of the dataset. Moreover, it shows the computational efficiency of the approach despite the huge dataset.