Functional Data Analysis for Predicting Pediatric Failure to Complete Ten Brief Exercise Bouts

Physiological response to physical exercise through analysis of cardiopulmonary measurements has been shown to be predictive of a variety of diseases. Nonetheless, the clinical use of exercise testing remains limited because interpretation of test results requires experience and specialized training. Additionally, until this work no methods have identified which dynamic gas exchange or heart rate responses influence an individual’s decision to start or stop physical activity. This research examines the use of advanced machine learning methods to predict completion of a test consisting of multiple exercise bouts by a group of healthy children and adolescents. All participants could complete the ten bouts at low or moderate-intensity work rates, however, when the bout work rates were high-intensity, 50% refused to begin the subsequent exercise bout before all ten bouts had been completed (task failure). We explored machine learning strategies to model the relationship between the physiological time series, the participant’s anthropometric variables, and the binary outcome variable indicating whether the participant completed the test. The best performing model, a generalized spectral additive model with functional and scalar covariates, achieved 93.6% classification accuracy and an F1 score of 93.5%. Additionally, functional analysis of variance testing showed that participants in the ‘failed’ and ‘success’ groups have significantly different functional means in three signals: heart rate, oxygen uptake rate, and carbon dioxide uptake rate. Overall, these results show the capability of functional data analysis with generalized spectral additive models to identify key differences in the exercise-induced responses of participants in multiple bout exercise testing.