Learning Attributes of Disease Progression from Trajectories of Sparse Lab Values

There is heterogeneity in the manifestation of diseases, therefore it is essential to understand the patterns of progression of a disease in a given population for disease management as well as for clinical research. Disease status is often summarized by repeated recordings of one or more physiological measures. As a result, historical values of these physiological measures for a population sample can be used to characterize disease progression patterns. We use a method for clustering sparse functional data for identifying sub-groups within a cohort of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), based on the trajectories of their Creatinine measurements. We demonstrate through a proof-of-principle study how the two sub-groups that display distinct patterns of disease progression may be compared on clinical attributes that correspond to the maximum difference in progression patterns. The key attributes that distinguish the two sub-groups appear to have support in published literature clinical practice related to CKD.