Descriptive Symbolic Models of Gaits from Parkinson's Disease Patients

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that has many debilitating symptoms which affect the patient's motor system and can cause significant changes in their gait. By using genetic programming, we aim to develop descriptive symbolic nonlinear models of PD patient gait from time series data recorded from pressure sensors under subjects' feet. When compared to popular types of linear regression (OLS and LASSO), the nonlinear models fit their data better and generalize to unseen data significantly better. It was found that models developed for healthy control subjects generalized to other control subjects well, however the models trained on subjects with PD did not generalize well to other PD patients, which complicates the issue of being able to detect the progression of the disease. It is suspected that health care professionals can have difficulty classifying PD due to a lack of accurate data from patient reports; having individually trained models for active monitoring of patients would help in effectively diagnosing PD.