Correlation enhanced distribution adaptation for prediction of fall risk

With technological advancements in diagnostic imaging, smart sensing, and wearables, a multitude of heterogeneous sources or modalities are available to proactively monitor the health of the elderly. Due to the increasing risks of falls among older adults, an early diagnosis tool is crucial to prevent future falls. However, during the early stage of diagnosis, there is often limited or no labeled data (expert-confirmed diagnostic information) available in the target domain (new cohort) to determine the proper treatment for older adults. Instead, there are multiple related but non-identical domain data with labels from the existing cohort or different institutions. Integrating different data sources with labeled and unlabeled samples to predict a patient's condition poses a significant challenge. Traditional machine learning models assume that data for new patients follow a similar distribution. If the data does not satisfy this assumption, the trained models do not achieve the expected accuracy, leading to potential misdiagnosing risks. To address this issue, we utilize domain adaptation (DA) techniques, which employ labeled data from one or more related source domains. These DA techniques promise to tackle discrepancies in multiple data sources and achieve a robust diagnosis for new patients. In our research, we have developed an unsupervised DA model to align two domains by creating a domain-invariant feature representation. Subsequently, we have built a robust fall-risk prediction model based on these new feature representations. The results from simulation studies and real-world applications demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms existing models.