Search

Emergency medical services (EMS) systems face significant challenges in managing fluctuating call volumes, where sudden demand surges can delay response times and worsen outcomes for critical conditions such as cardiac arrest, trauma, and stroke. Accurate forecasting of EMS demand supports proactive ambulance deployment, improving survival rates and resource efficiency, yet traditional methods like ARIMA and exponential smoothing fail to capture nonlinear spatial, temporal, weather, and event-driven effects, and do not provide uncertainty estimates needed for operational decision-making. This paper proposes a conceptual framework based on deep kernel learning with Gaussian processes for spatiotemporal EMS demand forecasting. The model integrates deep neural networks for feature extraction with Gaussian processes for probabilistic inference, enabling both flexible nonlinear representation and uncertainty quantification. It combines temporal, spatial, weather, and event-based kernels to model complex patterns in EMS call volumes. The framework produces predictive mean estimates along with calibrated uncertainty intervals, capturing effects such as weather-driven medical incidents and large public events. This probabilistic output supports risk-aware ambulance allocation strategies that balance over- and under-resourcing. Overall, the proposed approach provides a unified, interpretable, and uncertainty-aware solution for EMS demand forecasting, with future work aimed at validation on real-world datasets and comparison with existing methods.

Intensive care unit (ICU) data consist of high-frequency multivariate time series, including vital signs, laboratory results, and hemodynamic variables, which are crucial for clinical decision-making and predictive modeling. However, these data are frequently incomplete due to monitor interruptions, clinical workflows, and selective measurement, with missing rates ranging from 20% to over 80% depending on the variable. Missingness in ICU time series is often not random, as sicker patients tend to be monitored more frequently, creating a missing not at random (MNAR) mechanism. Conventional imputation methods such as mean filling, interpolation, and multiple imputation assume random missingness and therefore introduce bias and distort clinical signals under MNAR conditions. We propose a variational recurrent neural network (VRNN) with stochastic attention to impute ICU time series under MNAR settings. The framework integrates latent state modeling of physiological dynamics, stochastic attention over observed measurements using Gumbel-Softmax sampling, and a missingness pattern encoder that explicitly models the observation process. An imputation decoder generates probabilistic estimates of missing values conditioned on latent states, attention context, and missingness structure. This framework enables uncertainty-aware and potentially unbiased imputation in ICU time series by jointly modeling physiological dynamics and missingness mechanisms. It combines variational inference and stochastic attention to address systematic bias in conventional approaches, with future work needed to validate performance on real-world ICU datasets.