Interpretable machine learning for high-dimensional trajectories of aging health

05/07/2021

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by   Spencer Farrell, et al.

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19

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We have built a computational model for individual aging trajectories of health and survival, which contains physical, functional, and biological variables, and is conditioned on demographic, lifestyle, and medical background information. We combine techniques of modern machine learning with an interpretable interaction network, where health variables are coupled by explicit pair-wise interactions within a stochastic dynamical system. Our model is scalable to large longitudinal data sets, is predictive of individual high-dimensional health trajectories and survival from baseline health states, and infers an interpretable network of directed interactions between the health variables. The network identifies plausible physiological connections between health variables and clusters of strongly connected heath variables. We use English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA) data to train our model and show that it performs better than dedicated linear models for health outcomes and survival. Our model can also be used to generate synthetic individuals that age realistically, to impute missing data, and to simulate future aging outcomes given arbitrary initial health states.