Predictions of machine learning with mixed-effects in analyzing longitudinal data under model misspecification.

Hu, Shuwen; Wang, You-Gan; Drovandi, Christopher; Cao, Taoyun

We consider predictions in longitudinal studies, and investigate the well known statistical mixed-effects model, piecewise linear mixed-effects model and six different popular machine learning approaches: decision trees, bagging, random forest, boosting, support-vector machine and neural network. In order to consider the correlated data in machine learning, the random effects is combined into the traditional tree methods and random forest. Our focus is the performance of statistical modelling and machine learning especially in the cases of the misspecification of the fixed effects and the random effects. Extensive simulation studies have been carried out to evaluate the performance using a number of criteria. Two real datasets from longitudinal studies are analysed to demonstrate our findings. The R code and dataset are freely available at https://github.com/shuwen92/MEML.

PANEL analysis; MACHINE learning; BOOSTING algorithms; FIXED effects model; DECISION trees; RANDOM forest algorithms; DATA modeling; STATISTICAL models

Statistical Methods & Applications, 2023, Vol 32, Issue 2, p681

1618-2510

Academic Journal

10.1007/s10260-022-00658-x