Generating realistic patient data

Abstract

Developing algorithms for real-life problems that perform well in practice highly depends on the availability of realistic data for testing. Obtaining real-life data for optimization problems in health care, however, is often difficult. This is especially true for any patient related optimization problems, e.g., for patient-to-room assignment, due to data privacy policies. Furthermore, obtained real-life data usually cannot be published which prohibits reproducibility of results by other researchers. Therefore, often artificially generated instances are used. In this paper, we present combinatorial insights about the feasibility of instances for the patient-to-room assignment problem (PRA). We use these insights to develop a configurable instance generator for PRA with an easy-to-use graphical user interface. Configurability is in this case especially important as we observed in an extensive analysis of real-life data that, e.g., the probability distribution for patients' age and length of stay depends on the respective ward.