Constructed temporal features for longitudinal classification of human ageing data

Standard classification algorithms ignore the time-related information contained in longitudinal data, as they do not consider the time indexes of the features’ different measurements. Accounting for temporal patterns may improve the algorithms’ performance, when applied to longitudinal data. Representing temporal patterns in the data itself has the advantage that those patterns are generic enough to be used with existing powerful classification algorithms, without requiring the design of new and more complex algorithms to exploit them. In this article, we propose 6 different types of constructed temporal features (3 of them being novel contributions), calculated from the values of the different feature measurements taken over time, and investigate whether adding those constructed temporal features to the original longitudinal dataset improves the classification model’s predictive accuracy. Our experiments involved 20 real-world longitudinal datasets created from a human-ageing study, and showed that the proposed approach of adding the constructed temporal features to the original feature set produced better classifiers overall.