Generalized Heterogeneous Functional Model with Applications to Large-scale Mobile Health Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generalized heterogeneous functional model that captures subgroup-specific relationships in large-scale mobile health data, improving understanding and prediction of health outcomes like dementia risk.

Contribution

It proposes a novel generalized heterogeneous functional regression method with a pre-clustering approach and subgroup effect testing, advancing analysis of complex large-scale health data.

Findings

Identified three distinct subgroups in the UK Biobank data.

Outperformed existing methods in future-day prediction accuracy.

Demonstrated theoretical consistency of the proposed approach.

Abstract

Physical activity is crucial for human health. With the increasing availability of large-scale mobile health data, strong associations have been found between physical activity and various diseases. However, accurately capturing this complex relationship is challenging, possibly because it varies across different subgroups of subjects, especially in large-scale datasets. To fill this gap, we propose a generalized heterogeneous functional method which simultaneously estimates functional effects and identifies subgroups within the generalized functional regression framework. The proposed method captures subgroup-specific functional relationships between physical activity and diseases, providing a more nuanced understanding of these associations. Additionally, we develop a pre-clustering method that enhances computational efficiency for large-scale data through a finer partition of subjects compared to true subgroups. We further introduce a testing procedure to assess whether the different subgroups exhibit distinct functional effects. In the real data application, we examine the impact of physical activity on the risk of dementia using the UK Biobank dataset, which includes over 96,433 participants. Our proposed method outperforms existing methods in future-day prediction accuracy, identifying three distinct subgroups, with detailed scientific interpretations for each subgroup. We also demonstrate the theoretical consistency of our methods. Codes implementing the proposed method are available at: https://github.com/xiaojing777/GHFM.