Generalized functional linear model with a point process predictor

Abstract

Point process data have become increasingly popular these days. For example, many of the data captured in electronic health records (EHR) are in the format of point process data. It is of great interest to study the association between a point process predictor and a scalar response using generalized functional linear regression models. Various generalized functional linear regression models have been developed under different settings in the past decades. However, existing methods can only deal with functional or longitudinal predictors, not point process predictors. In this article, we propose a novel generalized functional linear regression model for a point process predictor. Our proposed model is based on the joint modeling framework, where we adopt a log‐Gaussian Cox process model for the point process predictor and a generalized linear regression model for the outcome. We also develop a new algorithm for fast model estimation based on the Gaussian variational approximation method. We conduct extensive simulation studies to evaluate the performance of our proposed method and compare it to competing methods. The performance of our proposed method is further demonstrated on an EHR dataset of patients admitted into the intensive care units of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center between 2001 and 2008.