Forecasting Opioid Incidents for Rapid Actionable Data for Opioid Response in Kentucky

We present efforts in the fields of machine learning and time series forecasting to accurately predict counts of future opioid overdose incidents recorded by Emergency Medical Services (EMS) in the state of Kentucky. Forecasts are useful to state government agencies to properly prepare and distribute resources related to opioid overdoses effectively. Our approach uses county and district level aggregations of EMS opioid overdose encounters and forecasts future counts for each month. A variety of additional covariates were tested to determine their impact on the model's performance. Models with different levels of complexity were evaluated to optimize training time and accuracy. Our results show that when special precautions are taken to address data sparsity, useful predictions can be generated with limited error by utilizing yearly trends and covariance with additional data sources.