Forecasting pharmacy purchases orders

Inventory represents the largest asset in pharmacy products distribution. Forecasting pharmacy purchases is essential to keep an effective stock balancing supply and demand besides minimizing costs. In this work, we investigate how to forecast product purchases for a pharmaceutical distributor. The data contains inventory sale histories for more than 10 thousand active products during the past 15 years. We discuss challenges on data preprocessing of the pharmacy data including cleaning, feature constructions and selections, as well as processing data during the COVID period. We experimented on different machine learning and deep learning neural network models to predict future purchases for each product, including classical Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA), Prophet from Facebook, linear regression, Random Forest, XGBoost and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). We demonstrate that a carefully designed SARIMA model outperformed the others on the task, and weekly prediction models perform better than daily predictions.

Predictive Modeling of Healthcare Professional's Stress Based on XGBoost Model

In India, the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a significant shortage of medicines and increased morbidity. COVID-19 has also had a profound influence on the psychological well-being of health professionals, who are surrounded by agony, death, and isolation as a result of the epidemic. The goal of this cross-sectional study is to look into the mental health of Indian healthcare workers during the second wave of the COVID-19 outbreak. From March 2021 to May 2021, a self-administered questionnaire based on the COVID-19 Stress Scale was delivered online to healthcare professionals (N = 836) in north India. An ensemble learning technique - Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) was applied to predict individual stress levels with 10-fold cross-validation. XGBoost had predicted stress with an average accuracy of 0.8889. According to the findings of this study, around 52.6 percent of healthcare professionals in the sample meet the threshold for severe psychiatric morbidity. In addition, advanced methodologies (SHAP values) were employed to determine which features had a significant impact on stress prediction. Medicine shortages and trouble concentrating were found to be the two most significant CSS predictors. © 2021 IEEE.

What Factors Are Most Closely Associated With Mood Disorders in Adolescents During the COVID-19 Pandemic? A Cross-Sectional Study Based on 1,771 Adolescents in Shandong Province, China.

Background and Aims: COVID-19 has been proven to harm adolescents' mental health, and several psychological influence factors have been proposed. However, the importance of these factors in the development of mood disorders in adolescents during the pandemic still eludes researchers, and practical strategies for mental health education are limited. Methods: We constructed a sample of 1,771 adolescents from three junior high middle schools, three senior high middle schools, and three independent universities in Shandong province, China. The sample stratification was set as 5:4:3 for adolescent aged from 12 - 15, 15 - 18, 18 - 19. We examined the subjects' anxiety, depression, psychological resilience, perceived social support, coping strategies, subjective social/school status, screen time, and sleep quality with suitable psychological scales. We chose four widely used classification models-k-nearest neighbors, logistic regression, gradient-boosted decision tree (GBDT), and a combination of the GBDT and LR (GBDT + LR)-to construct machine learning models, and we utilized the Shapley additive explanations value (SHAP) to measure how the features affected the dependent variables. The area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves was used to evaluate the performance of the models. Results: The current rates of occurrence of symptoms of anxiety and depression were 28.3 and 30.8% among the participants. The descriptive and univariate analyses showed that all of the factors included were statistically related to mood disorders. Among the four machine learning algorithms, the GBDT+LR algorithm achieved the best performance for anxiety and depression with average AUC values of 0.819 and 0.857. We found that the poor sleep quality was the most significant risk factor for mood disorders among Chinese adolescents. In addition, according to the feature importance (SHAP) of the psychological factors, we proposed a five-step mental health education strategy to be used during the COVID-19 pandemic (sleep quality-resilience-coping strategy-social support-perceived social status). Conclusion: In this study, we performed a cross-sectional investigation to examine the psychological impact of COVID-19 on adolescents. We applied machine learning algorithms to quantify the importance of each factor. In addition, we proposed a five-step mental health education strategy for school psychologists.