Predicting Parkinson's Disease Progression Using Statistical and Neural Mixed Effects Models: A Comparative Study on Longitudinal Biomarkers
This work addresses the problem of accurate disease progression prediction for Parkinson's patients and clinicians, but it is incremental as it builds on existing hybrid methods.
This study tackled the challenge of predicting Parkinson's Disease progression by benchmarking Linear Mixed Models against two hybrid neural network approaches, GNMM and NME, using voice biomarkers from the Oxford dataset, and found that NME achieved the best performance with a 15% reduction in prediction error compared to LMMs.
Predicting Parkinson's Disease (PD) progression is crucial, and voice biomarkers offer a non-invasive method for tracking symptom severity (UPDRS scores) through telemonitoring. Analyzing this longitudinal data is challenging due to within-subject correlations and complex, nonlinear patient-specific progression patterns. This study benchmarks LMMs against two advanced hybrid approaches: the Generalized Neural Network Mixed Model (GNMM) (Mandel 2021), which embeds a neural network within a GLMM structure, and the Neural Mixed Effects (NME) model (Wortwein 2023), allowing nonlinear subject-specific parameters throughout the network. Using the Oxford Parkinson's telemonitoring voice dataset, we evaluate these models' performance in predicting Total UPDRS to offer practical guidance for PD research and clinical applications.