Prediction of blood glucose concentration for type 1 diabetes based on echo state networks embedded with incremental learning

Abstract

Valid prediction of blood glucose concentration can help people to manage diabetes mellitus, alert hypoglycemia/hyperglycemia, exploit artificial pancreas, and plan a treatment program. Along the development of continuous glucose monitoring system (CGMS), the massive historical data require a new modeling framework based on a data-driven perspective. Studies indicate that the glucose time series (i.e., CGMS readings) involve chaotic properties; therefore, echo state networks (ESN) and its improved variants are proposed to establish subject-specific prediction models owing to their superiority in processing chaotic systems. This study mainly has two innovations: (1) a novel combination of incremental learning and ESN is developed to obtain a suitable network structure through partial optimization of parameters; (2) a feedback ESN is proposed to excavate the relationship of different predictions. These methods are assessed on ten patients with diabetes mellitus. Experimental results substantiate that the proposed methods achieve superior prediction performance in terms of four evaluation metrics compared with three conventional methods.