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Change Point Analysis on Affordable Care Act Through Emergency Department Visits (308502)

Keywords: Change Point, Spatio-Temporal Analysis, Affordable Care Act

The logistics of policy implementation can lead to a delay when the actual change in behavior occurs, leading to a shift in a time series from when the policy was put into place. Using change point analysis allows for the data to determine where a change in mean, or other parameters, occurred. We develop spatio-temporal change point methodologies to investigate when the average counts of emergency department (ED) visits before and after the Affordable Care Act was enacted to determine at what time point the mean ED visits changed, using monthly time series from 88 locations. Locations with similar temporal behavior are clustered together using a modified binary segmentation cost function that enables clustering based on similar change point locations.