A large medical clinic would like to forecast daily patient visits for purposes of staffing.
(a) if data is available only for the last month, how does this affect the choice of model based vs. data-driven methods.
(b) The clinic has access to the admissions data of a neraby hospital. Under what conditions will including the hospital information be potentially useful for forecasting the clinics daily visits?
(c) Thus far, the clinic administrators takes a heuristic appraoch, using the visit numbers from the same day of the previous week as a forecast. what is the advantage of this approach? what is the disadvantage?
(d) what level of automation appears to be required for this task? Explain.
(e) describe two approaches for improving the current heuristic (naive) forecasting approach using ensambles.