Comparison of parametric and non‐parametric Bayesian inference for fusing sensory estimates in physiological time‐series analysis

The rapid proliferation of wearable devices for medical applications has necessitated the need for automated algorithms to provide labelling of physiological time‐series data to identify abnormal morphology. However, such algorithms are less reliable than gold‐standard human expert labels (where the latter are typically difficult and expensive to obtain), due to their large inter‐ and intra‐subject variabilities. Actions taken in response to these algorithms can therefore result in sub‐optimal patient care. In a typical scenario where only unevenly sampled continuous or numeric estimates are provided, without access to the “ground truth”, it is challenging to choose which algorithms to trust and which to ignore, or even how to merge the outputs from multiple algorithms to form a more precise final estimate for individual patients. In this work, the novel application of two previously proposed parametric fully‐Bayesian graphical models is demonstrated for fusing labels from (i) independent and (ii) potentially correlated algorithms, validated on two publicly available datasets for the task of respiratory rate (RR) estimation. These unsupervised models aggregate RR labels and estimate jointly the assumed bias and precision of each algorithm. Fusing estimates in this way may then be used to infer the underlying ground truth for individual patients. It is shown that modelling the latent correlations between algorithms improves the RR estimates, when compared to commonly employed strategies in the literature. Finally, it is demonstrated that the adoption of a strongly Bayesian approach to inference using Gibbs sampling results in improved estimation over the current state‐of‐the‐art (e.g. hierarchical Gaussian processes) in physiological time‐series modelling.