The work presents methods for modeling intensive longitudinal data. Wearable devices with sensors (e.g. smart watches) are making constant gathering of physiological data easier. Longitudinal data have their special characteristics, that stem from taking time into account in analyses - individuals are measured at multiple occasions. Intensive longitudinal data have very frequent measurements and allow modeling of processes at the level of the individual. This is opening new opportunities in the field of personalized medicine.
In the first part of the text, an interactive tool for working with longitudinal data is presented. {\tt medplot} was developed to enable non-statisticians access to some advanced methods for analyzing longitudinal data. With the application and the explanations of interpreting the results we have offered biomedical users a tool for more advanced analysis of longitudinal data and have in this way contributed to the advancement of the field by easier adoption of the methods in practice.
In the second part, the problem of periodic longitudinal data is tackled - this is data which values repeat with some period of time, e.g. yearly. An established method of modeling with restricted cubic splines (RCS) is upgraded, to take into account the periodicity of the data. By deriving periodic RCS and implementing them in the {\tt peRiodiCS} package, we have contributed to the field of modeling periodic data, as we have offered another tool, which has in some cases better characteristics as the existing ones, due to the smaller number of estimated parameters.
In the third part, heart rate intensive longitudinal data is looked at with the purpose of predicting an upcoming event of atrial fibrillation. Bag of patterns representation of data is used with cross validation procedure to check the predictive properties at different parameter values. Data had the shortcomings of a relatively small sample. We believe the findings might represent a starting point or some guidance at additional research, when larger data sets of heart rate for individuals become available.
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