Can we use machine learning to predict cognitive performance from actigraphy data? Preliminary results from the UK Biobank Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Circadian rhythms (i.e., the ∼24‐hour biological clock) are critical to the maintenance of the sleep‐wake cycle, and sleep‐wake disturbances are common in people at risk for cognitive decline and dementia. Several studies have identified circadian factors associated with cognitive decline using actigraphy (a common field measure for indexing the sleep‐wake cycle). However, there are currently untapped opportunities to use the power of artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning (ML), to improve our ability to identify signs of cognitive decline from actigraphy data. As a first step towards this goal, we examined the utility of two supervised ML models for predicting cognitive performance using data from the UK Biobank study. Method A cross‐sectional analysis of participants in the UK Biobank study (40‐69 years at entry) with valid actigraphy data and complete cognitive data (N = 49,469). Participants completed computerized versions of Trail Making Test B‐A (TMT) and Digit Symbol Substitution Test (DSST). Actigraphy data were collected over 7 days, with average hourly movement being indexed. Along with 24‐hour actigraphy data, we included the following features in each model: age, biological sex, household income, educational attainment, smoking and alcohol intake, ethnicity, body mass index, and Townsend Deprivation Index. Seventy percent of participants were randomized to the training set, with the remaining 30% held out as a test set. We developed two separate ML models to predict cognitive performance: 1) a linear regression approach; and 2) a 3‐hidden layer (40 hidden units per layer) neural network. Model accuracy was compared using the coefficient of determination (R 2 ). Result Mean age was 55 years (SD = 8 years) and 56% of participants were female. Average TMT time was 27.22 seconds (SD = 20.10 seconds), and mean DSST score was 20.06 (SD = 5.04). Our supervised linear regression had modest predictive ability of TMT (R 2 = 8%) and DSST performance (R 2 = 21%); the 3‐hidden layer neural network had similar predictive capability for both TMT (R 2 = 8%) and DSST (R 2 = 21%). Conclusion ML approaches for predicting cognitive performance using actigraphy data show modest capability. Further work is needed to identify how ML can be used to predict cognitive function from biometric data.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".