HealthMamba: An Uncertainty-aware Spatiotemporal Graph State Space Model for Effective and Reliable Healthcare Facility Visit Prediction

Abstract

Healthcare facility visit prediction is essential for optimizing healthcare resource allocation and informing public health policy. Despite advanced machine learning methods being employed for better prediction performance, existing works usually formulate this task as a time-series forecasting problem without considering the intrinsic spatial dependencies of different types of healthcare facilities, and they also fail to provide reliable predictions under abnormal situations such as public emergencies. To advance existing research, we propose HealthMamba, an uncertainty-aware spatiotemporal framework for accurate and reliable healthcare facility visit prediction. HealthMamba comprises three key components: (i) a Unified Spatiotemporal Context Encoder that fuses heterogeneous static and dynamic information, (ii) a novel Graph State Space Model called GraphMamba for hierarchical spatiotemporal modeling, and (iii) a comprehensive uncertainty quantification module integrating three uncertainty quantification mechanisms for reliable prediction. We evaluate HealthMamba on four large-scale real-world datasets from California, New York, Texas, and Florida. Results show HealthMamba achieves around 6.0% improvement in prediction accuracy and 3.5% improvement in uncertainty quantification over state-of-the-art baselines.