IE 322 Probabilistic Models in Industrial Engineering
Case Study 1
Objective: This case study aims to apply the basic concepts of probability to the management
of patient flows in an emergency department of Hospital X. Students are required to understand
• the concepts of probability of events, conditional probability and independence, sampling
and counting, and the fundamental rules including the additive rule and multiplicative
rule.
• the concepts of bivariate distributions including joint probability mass function, marginal
distributions and conditional distributions, as well as covariance and correlations.
Data Description: The data set contains 500 patient visits in the emergency department with
the acuity level, the decision of admission (hospitalization) and the length of stay (ED Duration).
The acuity level is classified into five levels, L1-L5, with L1 being the least severity and L5 being
the most. The admission decisions are labeled as 1 or 0, with 1 indicating that a patient was
admitted (hospitalized) while 0 indicating that a patient was discharged. The date set is
attached as an excel file