Emergency Department Admissions: Analysis of CDS Dataset (part 5)
I analyse an anonymised data dump of 1.9 million admissions records to the emergency departments of an undisclosed NHS Trust for the period June 2017 – September 2021
In this article I want us to get a feel for some basic relationships within the CDS dataset before the iron curtain came down in spring 2020. I shall call this normal era modelling, and I’ll use January 2017 – February 2020 for my data sample, this giving me 1,373,963 admission records.
Before we get stuck in we need to consider age at admission in a bit more detail, so let’s get binning and counting:
There you go, that’s what I wanted to illustrate over there on the left - a preponderance of infant and neonatal admissions who will have their own blend of woes and issues, the poor wee mites. In the same vein youngsters have their own special blend of reasons, and won’t start falling off mopeds, scooters and motorcycles under 50cc until the age of 16. I thus decided to restrict the sample a little by limiting it to adults aged 18 years and over, this giving me 1,077,116 admissions over the period January 2017 – February 2020.
Age Effects
Aside from its interaction with sex, we’ve got arrival mode and disposal method to consider as well as 9 diagnostic and 7 treatment categories, making a total of 19 independent variables to think about. This seemed like hard work so I decided to run a neural network procedure (multilayer perceptron) to point a few things out in one almighty black box crunch-e-rama drama. If I ignore oodles of printout and cut to the chase then this modest table tells me what I want to know:
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