cs.LGNov 9, 2021

Subtyping patients with chronic disease using longitudinal BMI patterns

Authors: Md Mozaharul MottalibJessica C Jones-SmithBethany SheridanRahmatollah Beheshti

Abstract

Obesity is a major health problem, increasing the risk of various major chronic diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, and stroke. While the role of obesity identified by cross-sectional BMI recordings has been heavily studied, the role of BMI trajectories is much less explored. In this study, we use a machine-learning approach to subtype individuals' risk of developing 18 major chronic diseases by using their BMI trajectories extracted from a large and geographically diverse EHR dataset capturing the health status of around two million individuals for a period of six years. We define nine new interpretable and evidence-based variables based on the BMI trajectories to cluster the patients into subgroups using the k-means clustering method. We thoroughly review each cluster's characteristics in terms of demographic, socioeconomic, and physiological measurement variables to specify the distinct properties of the patients in the clusters. In our experiments, the direct relationship of obesity with diabetes, hypertension, Alzheimer's, and dementia has been re-established and distinct clusters with specific characteristics for several of the chronic diseases have been found to be conforming or complementary to the existing body of knowledge.

Explore similar work

Jun 26, 2026cs.LG

Improving Patient Subtyping on Longitudinal Data using Representations from Mamba-based Architecture

Effective sub-typing (also known as grouping or clustering) of patients using their electronic health record (EHR) data can greatly inform precision medicine efforts. However, subtyping temporal EHR datasets is known to be challenging due to inherent EHR issues, including complexity and irregularity. In this study, we propose a self-supervised Mamba-based model that learns effective EHR representations and enables enhanced patient subtyping. We evaluate the proposed model on public and private real-world EHR datasets to classify the data based on the available labels and subtype patients based on the representations learned from the model. Through an extensive set of experiments, we demonstrate that our model's design choices lead to better performance compared to competitive baseline models for prediction. Moreover, we evaluate several clustering techniques to demonstrate that our findings offer valuable insights into subtyping patients based on temporal records from EHR models\footnote{Our implementations are available at https://github.com/healthylaife/triplet_mamba.
Md Mozaharul Mottalib, Rahmatollah Beheshti
May 13, 2026cs.LG

A Unified Three-Stage Machine Learning Framework for Diabetes Detection, Subtype Discrimination, and Cognitive-Metabolic Hypothesis Testing

Diabetes mellitus affects over 537 million adults worldwide and remains a major challenge in preventive healthcare. Existing machine-learning studies primarily formulate diabetes prediction as a binary classification problem, while subtype-oriented analysis and glycaemic-cognitive associations remain comparatively underexplored. We present a reproducible three-stage machine learning framework for diabetes detection, subtype-oriented clustering, and metabolic-cognitive association analysis. In Stage 1, five supervised classifiers together with a stacking ensemble are benchmarked on the NCSU Diabetes Dataset using stratified five-fold cross-validation and evaluation metrics including ROC-AUC, balanced accuracy, recall, and F1-score. SVM-RBF and Logistic Regression achieve the highest ROC-AUC (0.825±0.0260.825 \pm 0.026), while Random Forest achieves the highest accuracy (0.762±0.0300.762 \pm 0.030). SHAP explainability identifies Glucose, BMI, and Age as the dominant predictive biomarkers. In Stage 2, silhouette-validated K-Means clustering (k=2k=2, silhouette 0.116\approx 0.116) is applied to confirmed diabetic cases using Glucose, Insulin, and Age, recovering clinically plausible subtype-oriented partitions without requiring ground-truth subtype labels. In Stage 3, statistical analysis of the Ohio Longitudinal Cognitive Dataset (n=373n=373) reveals a significant positive association between glycaemic control and cognitive function (ρs=0.208ρ_s = 0.208, p=5.29×105p = 5.29 \times 10^{-5}), which survives Holm correction. The findings support the utility of statistically grounded and interpretable ML pipelines for reproducible diabetes analytics and subtype-aware exploratory analysis.
Vishal Pandey, Ruzina Haque Laskar, Rishav Tewari
Aug 25, 2026cs.LG

DeMMO: Longitudinal and Cross-Disease Modelling of Digital Mobility Outcomes via Multi-Task Learning

Digital mobility outcomes (DMOs) derived from wearable sensors characterise mobility in daily life and offer a promising means of monitoring disease progression. However, existing DMO studies have typically focused on either a single disease or a single visit. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically model and analyse longitudinal multivariate DMOs across diverse mobility-limiting diseases. Specifically, we propose DeMMO, an interpretable framework for longitudinal, multi-disease, and multi-outcome learning. DeMMO represents each disease--outcome objective using a longitudinal DMO coefficient matrix and combines temporal regularisation with stable and visit-specific feature selection. Its central technical contribution is an automatic cross-disease and cross-outcome relation-learning mechanism that infers signed relations directly from these longitudinal mappings, thereby enabling selective information sharing across cohorts without requiring paired participants. We evaluate DeMMO on the recently released, large-scale, multicentre Mobilise-D dataset, which comprises four participant-disjoint cohorts representing distinct mobility-limiting diseases, with each cohort contributing one or more clinical measurement outcomes. Compared with eight strong structural longitudinal and deep-regression baselines, DeMMO achieves the best overall predictive performance and outperforms the baselines for most individual outcomes. Stability selection further identifies reliable longitudinal DMO patterns that can inform subsequent clinical validation and disease monitoring. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/menghui-zhou/DeMMO.
Menghui Zhou, Zhipeng Yuan, Vitaveska Lanfranchi +1