Forecasting Teleconsultation Demand Using an Ensemble CNN Attention-Based BILSTM Model with Additional Variables

To enhance the forecasting accuracy of daily teleconsultation demand, this study proposes an ensemble hybrid deep learning model. The proposed ensemble CNN attention-based BILSTM model (ECA-BILSTM) combines shallow convolutional neural networks (CNNs), attention mechanisms, and bidirectional long short-term memory (BILSTM). Moreover, additional variables are selected according to the characteristics of teleconsultation demand and added to the inputs of forecasting models. To verify the superiority of ECA-BILSTM and the effectiveness of additional variables, two actual teleconsultation datasets collected in the National Telemedicine Center of China (NTCC) are used as the experimental data. Results showed that ECA-BILSTMs can significantly outperform corresponding benchmark models. And two key additional variables were identified for teleconsultation demand prediction improvement. Overall, the proposed ECA-BILSTM model with effective additional variables is a feasible promising approach in teleconsultation demand forecasting.