Deep learning modeling to assess surface temperature and greenery impact on emergency room access

Abstract The escalating land surface temperature is a key environmental indicator with potential repercussions on human health. An artificial NN model was built to predict the number of ER accesses as a dependent variable, to establish the predictive power and interactions of land surface temperature and normalized differential vegetation index(NDVI), which is used to measure urban greenery.A map of Taranto was built by vector files on the Apulia region website and processed using R Studio 2023.06.2.The vector file containing the mapping of the city of Taranto was processed to obtain a 200mx200m grid of the entire surface.The Local Health Authority of Taranto provided indications of the residences of ER accesses, and coordinates were merged to gridded vector file to obtain the average of ER accesses and the socio demographic features per single grid unit. NDVI and surface temperature were averaged for July 2023 using images from Landsat 8(30m) and merged to the vector providing an average value of temperature and NDVI index per single quadrant. The dataset was divided into two db according to an 80/20 ratio respectively for the training and test dataset.A NN model was built on dichotomous value (above/below median) for each quadrant (6513 units) with hyperparameter tuning technique using the accuracy to select the best model.A MOC model was built to reduce the probability of NN detection by at least 40% in a randomly selected subject.A MOC model was built considering sociodemographic variables as fixed features and an epsilon of 0 for 175 generations and an ICE curves population initialization strategy. NNET accuracy value was 0.849 and 0.841 in training and testing, suggesting a good fitting of the model.Relative change plots were adopted to show the amount and the direction of generated counterfactuals, to reduce grid unit prediction to be over median.LST decreasing and NDVI score increasing were associated with a reduction of classification probability of grid unit. Key messages • Rising land surface temperature is a critical environmental indicator with potential impacts on human health. • Artificial neural network models perform well in predicting the number of ER accesses with respect to land surface temperature and NDVI, which is used to measure urban greenery.