Enhancing Grammatical Evolution Through Data Augmentation: Application to Blood Glucose Forecasting

Currently, Diabetes Mellitus Type 1 patients are waiting hopefully for the arrival of the Artificial Pancreas (AP) in a near future. AP systems will control the blood glucose of people that suffer the disease, improving their lives and reducing the risks they face everyday. At the core of the AP, an algorithm will forecast future glucose levels and estimate insulin bolus sizes. Grammatical Evolution (GE) has been proved as a suitable algorithm for predicting glucose levels. Nevertheless, one the main obstacles that researches have found for training the GE models is the lack of significant amounts of data. As in many other fields in medicine, the collection of data from real patients is very complex. In this paper, we propose a data augmentation algorithm that generates synthetic glucose time series from real data. The synthetic time series can be used to train a unique GE model or to produce several GE models that work together in a combining system. Our experimental results show that, in a scarce data context, Grammatical Evolution models can get more accurate and robust predictions using data augmentation.