Logistic and neural network models for predicting a hospital admission

Feedforward neural networks are often used in a similar manner as logistic regression models; that is, to estimate the probability of the occurrence of an event. In this paper, a probabilistic model is developed for the purpose of estimating the probability that a patient who has been admitted to the hospital with a medical back diagnosis will be released after only a short stay or will remain hospitalized for a longer period of time. As the purpose of the analysis is to determine if hospital characteristics influence the decision to retain a patient, the inputs to this model are a set of demographic variables that describe the various hospitals. The output is the probability of either a short or long term hospital stay. In order to compare the ability of each method to model the data, a hypothesis test is performed to test for an improvement resulting from the use of the neural network model.