Joint Hypoglycemia Prediction and Glucose Forecasting via Deep Multi-task Learning

Abstract

We present a multitask learning approach to the problem of hypoglycemia (HG) prediction in diabetes. The approach is based on a state-of-the-art time series forecasting model, N-BEATS, and extends it by adding a classification task so that the model performs both glucose forecasting (i.e., predicting future glucose values) and HG prediction (i.e., probability of future HG events sometime within the prediction horizon). We also propose an alternative loss function that penalizes forecasting errors in the HG range. We evaluate the approach on a dataset containing over 1.6M recordings from 112 patients with type 1 diabetes who wore a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) for 90 days. Our results show that the classification branch significantly outperforms the forecasting branch on the problem of HG prediction, and that the new loss function is more effective at reducing forecasting errors in the HG range than multi-task learning.