Predicting glycemia in diabetic patients by evolutionary computation and continuous glucose monitoring

Diabetes mellitus is a disease that affects more than three hundreds million people worldwide. Maintaining a good control of the disease is critical to avoid not only severe long-term complications but also dangerous short-term situations. Diabetics need to decide the appropriate insulin injection, thus they need to be able to estimate the level of glucose they are going to have after a meal. In this paper we use machine learning techniques for predicting glycemia in diabetic patients. The algorithms utilize data collected from real patients by a continuous glucose monitoring system, the estimated number of carbohydrates, and insulin administration for each meal. We compare (1) non-linear regression with fixed model structure, (2) identification of prognosis models by symbolic regression using genetic programming, (3) prognosis by k-nearest-neighbor time series search, and (4) identification of prediction models by grammatical evolution. We consider predictions horizons of 30, 60, 90 and 120 minutes.