Data-Driven Causal Discovery: Insights from a Longitudinal Study with Wearable Data
摘要
Wearable devices offer unprecedented opportunities for continuous health monitoring and data collection in the general or clinical populations. In this study, we explore the feasibility of using data from consumer-grade wearable devices, combined with daily questionnaires, for long-term telemonitoring. To validate the plausibility of collected data at the level of relationships among derived variables, the causal structure is estimated in a data-driven way, and evaluated against existing literature to ensure alignment with established findings. Identification of the causal relationships is done with Structural Expectation-Maximization (SEM) algorithm, to address the challenge of missing data, and further strengthened by providing an initial structure estimated by the bootstrapped Temporal Peter-Clark (TPC) algorithm. Obtained results demonstrate plausibility of the discovered relationships, evaluated both against existing literature and in a data-driven way by fitting a Bayesian network. This supports the utility of consumer-grade wearables for continuous monitoring, and enabling new directions for designing of targeted interventions.