A Human-in-the-Loop Segmented Mixed-Effects Modeling Method for Analyzing Wearables Data

Abstract

Wearables are an important source of big data, as they provide real-time high-resolution data logs of health indicators of individuals. Higher-order associations between pairs of variables is common in wearables data. Representing higher-order association curves as piecewise linear segments in a regression model makes them more interpretable. However, existing methods for identifying the change points for segmented modeling either overfit or have low external validity for wearables data containing repeated measures. Therefore, we propose a human-in-the-loop method for segmented modeling of higher-order pairwise associations between variables in wearables data. Our method uses the smooth function estimated by a generalized additive mixed model to allow the analyst to annotate change point estimates for a segmented mixed-effects model, and thereafter employs Brent's constrained optimization procedure to fine-tune the manually provided estimates. We validate our method using three real-world wearables datasets. Our method not only outperforms state-of-the-art modeling methods in terms of prediction performance but also provides more interpretable results. Our study contributes to health data science in terms of developing a new method for interpretable modeling of wearables data. Our analysis uncovers interesting insights on higher-order associations for health researchers.