Bayesian structural time series for biomedical sensor data: A flexible modeling framework for evaluating interventions

Jason Liu, Daniel J. Spakowicz, Garrett I. Ash, Rebecca Hoyd, Rohan Ahluwalia, Andrew Zhang, Shaoke Lou, Donghoon Lee, Jing Zhang, Carolyn Presley, Ann Greene, Matthew Stults-Kolehmainen, Laura M. Nally, Julien S. Baker, Lisa M. Fucito, Stuart A. Weinzimer, Andrew V. Papachristos, Mark Gerstein

Abstract: Author summary In this paper, we propose and describe a robust and flexible modeling framework called MhealthCI based on the Bayesian structural time series, for which we have found to excel at analyzing diverse biosensor data. While Bayesian modeling is often employed in various fields such as finance, marketing, and weather forecasting, it is rarely used in biomedicine, specifically for biosensor and wearable data relating to human health and behavior. We use and apply this framework with the goal of interpreting and quantifying the causal impact of an intervention, a widespread goal of biomedicine. We describe the diversity of data types to which it could apply, provide intuition to its mechanics, collect relevant data in various fields, provide a wrapper tool around well-known R packages that prepares and registers diverse biosensor data to be analyzed, and finally apply the method to showcase its strength in quantifying the impact of interventions.