Cited by 58Mental Health Research TopicsBipolar Disorder and TreatmentDigital Mental Health Interventions

Forecasting Mood in Bipolar Disorder From Smartphone Self-assessments: Hierarchical Bayesian Approach.

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Busk, Jonas, Faurholt-Jepsen, Maria, Frost, Mads, Bardram, Jakob E, Vedel Kessing, Lars, Winther, Ole·2020·JMIR mhealth and uhealth

Published version of a preprint

Abstract

Background Bipolar disorder is a prevalent mental health condition that is imposing significant burden on society. Accurate forecasting of symptom scores can be used to improve disease monitoring, enable early intervention, and eventually help prevent costly hospitalizations. Although several studies have examined the use of smartphone data to detect mood, only few studies deal with forecasting mood for one or more days. Objective This study aimed to examine the feasibility of forecasting daily subjective mood scores based on daily self-assessments collected from patients with bipolar disorder via a smartphone-based system in a randomized clinical trial. Methods We applied hierarchical Bayesian regression models, a multi-task learning method, to account for individual differences and forecast mood for up to seven days based on 15,975 smartphone self-assessments from 84 patients with bipolar disorder participating in a randomized clinical trial. We reported the results of two time-series cross-validation 1-day forecast experiments corresponding to two different real-world scenarios and compared the outcomes with commonly used baseline methods. We then applied the best model to evaluate a 7-day forecast. Results The best performing model used a history of 4 days of self-assessment to predict future mood scores with historical mood being the most important predictor variable. The proposed hierarchical Bayesian regression model outperformed pooled and separate models in a 1-day forecast time-series cross-validation experiment and achieved the predicted metrics, R2=0.51 and root mean squared error of 0.32, for mood scores on a scale of −3 to 3. When increasing the forecast horizon, forecast errors also increased and the forecast regressed toward the mean of data distribution. Conclusions Our proposed method can forecast mood for several days with low error compared with common baseline methods. The applicability of a mood forecast in the clinical treatment of bipolar disorder has also been discussed.

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Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. [32]Hyndman RJ Athanasopoulos G Forecasting: Principles and Practice. Second Edition 2018 OTexts Melbourne, Australia
  2. [39]Molnar C Interpretable machine learning: A Guide for Making Black Box Models Explainable 2019 North Carolina, United States Lulu Press

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Authors
Busk, J., Faurholt-Jepsen, M., Frost, M., Bardram, J. E., Vedel Kessing, L., & Winther, O.
Affiliations
  • Technical University of Denmark (DK)
  • University of Copenhagen (DK)
Corresponding author
Busk, Jonas
Venue
JMIR mhealth and uhealth
Published
2020-04-01
Volume
8
Issue
4
Pages
e15028
ISSN
2291-5222 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2996627455
Cited by
58
References
40
Citations by year
2026: 11 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 6
FWCI
6.78
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • JMIR mhealth and uhealth (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Research at the University of Copenhagen (University of Copenhagen) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • Technical University of Denmark, DTU Orbit (Technical University of Denmark, DTU) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
Funders
Innovationsfonden
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Mental Health Research Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Psychiatry and Mental health › Bipolar Disorder and Treatment
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Applied Psychology › Digital Mental Health Interventions
Keywords
bipolar disorder, Bayesian hierarchical model, multi-task learning, time series cross-validation, forecast horizon, regression to the mean, individual differences
MeSH terms
Smartphone, Affect, Bayes Theorem, Bipolar Disorder, Forecasting, Humans

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