Combining mixed effects hidden Markov models with latent alternating recurrent event processes to model diurnal active–rest cycles

Benny Ren and Ian Barnett

Biometrics, 2023, vol. 79, issue 4, 3402-3417

Abstract: Data collected from wearable devices can shed light on an individual's pattern of behavioral and circadian routine. Phone use can be modeled as alternating processes, between the state of active use and the state of being idle. Markov chains and alternating recurrent event models are commonly used to model state transitions in cases such as these, and the incorporation of random effects can be used to introduce diurnal effects. While state labels can be derived prior to modeling dynamics, this approach omits informative regression covariates that can influence state memberships. We instead propose an alternating recurrent event proportional hazards (PH) regression to model the transitions between latent states. We propose an expectation–maximization algorithm for imputing latent state labels and estimating parameters. We show that our E‐step simplifies to the hidden Markov model (HMM) forward–backward algorithm, allowing us to recover an HMM with logistic regression transition probabilities. In addition, we show that PH modeling of discrete‐time transitions implicitly penalizes the logistic regression likelihood and results in shrinkage estimators for the relative risk. This new estimator favors an extended stay in a state and is useful for modeling diurnal rhythms. We derive asymptotic distributions for our parameter estimates and compare our approach against competing methods through simulation as well as in a digital phenotyping study that followed smartphone use in a cohort of adolescents with mood disorders.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/biom.13865

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:biomet:v:79:y:2023:i:4:p:3402-3417

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0006-341X

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Biometrics from The International Biometric Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().