Errors-in-Variables Modeling of Personalized Treatment-Response Trajectories

IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2021 Jan;25(1):201-208. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2020.2987323. Epub 2021 Jan 5.

Abstract

Estimating the impact of a treatment on a given response is needed in many biomedical applications. However, methodology is lacking for the case when the response is a continuous temporal curve, treatment covariates suffer extensively from measurement error, and even the exact timing of the treatments is unknown. We introduce a novel method for this challenging scenario. We model personalized treatment-response curves as a combination of parametric response functions, hierarchically sharing information across individuals, and a sparse Gaussian process for the baseline trend. Importantly, our model accounts for errors not only in treatment covariates, but also in treatment timings, a problem arising in practice for example when data on treatments are based on user self-reporting. We validate our model with simulated and real patient data, and show that in a challenging application of estimating the impact of diet on continuous blood glucose measurements, accounting for measurement error significantly improves estimation and prediction accuracy.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Humans
  • Normal Distribution
  • Precision Medicine*