Personalized Prediction of Parkinson’s Disease Progression Based on Deep Gaussian Processes

Parkinson’s disease is a chronic progressive neurodegenerative disease with highly heterogeneous symptoms and progression. It is helpful for patient management to establish a personalized model that integrates heterogeneous interpretation methods to predict disease progression. In the study, we propose a novel approach based on a multi-task learning framework to divide Parkinson’s disease progression modeling into an unsupervised clustering task and a disease progression prediction task. On the one hand, the method can cluster patients with different progression trajectories and discover new progression patterns of Parkinson’s disease. On the other hand, the discovery of new progression patterns helps to predict the future progression of Parkinson’s disease markers more accurately through parameter sharing among multiple tasks. We discovered three different Parkinson’s disease progression patterns and achieved better prediction performance (MAE=5.015, RMSE=7.284, r2=0.727) than previously proposed methods on Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative datasets, which is a longitudinal cohort study with newly diagnosed Parkinson’s disease.