Problem 4.9 A hospital manager wants to predict how many beds will be needed in the

geriatric ward. He asks you to design a neural network method for making this prediction.

He has data for the last 5 years that cover:

The number of people in the geriatric ward each week.

The weather (average day and night temperatures).

The season of the year (spring, summer, autumn, winter).

Whether or not there was an epidemic on (use a binary variable: yes or no).

Design a suitable MLP for this problem, considering how you would choose the number

of hidden neurons, the inputs (and whether there are any other inputs you need) and

the preprocessing, and whether or not you would expect the system to work.