Forecasting of sick leave usage among nurses via artificial neural networks

This report examines the trends in sick leave usage among nurses in a hospital and aims at creating a forecasting model to predict sick leave usage on a weekly basis using the concept of artificial neural networks (ANN). The data used for the research includes the absenteeism (sick leave) reports for 3 years at a hospital. The analysis shows that there are certain factors that lead to a rise or fall in the weekly sick leave usage. The ANN model tries to capture the effect of these factors and forecasts the sick leave usage for a 1 year horizon based on what it has learned from the behavior of the historical data from the previous 2 years. The various parameters of the model are determined and the model is constructed and tested for its forecasting ability.