Predicting the Severity of Parkinson’s Disease Dementia by Assessing the Neuropsychiatric Symptoms with an SVM Regression Model

Abstract

In this study, we measured the convergence rate using the mean-squared error (MSE) of the standardized neuropsychological test to determine the severity of Parkinson’s disease dementia (PDD), which is based on support vector machine (SVM) regression (SVR) and present baseline data in order to develop a model to predict the severity of PDD. We analyzed 328 individuals with PDD who were 60 years or older. To identify the SVR with the best prediction power, we compared the classification performance (convergence rate) of eight SVR models (Eps-SVR and Nu-SVR with four kernel functions (a radial basis function (RBF), linear algorithm, polynomial algorithm, and sigmoid)). Among the eight models, the MSE of Nu-SVR-RBF was the lowest (0.078), with the highest convergence rate, whereas the MSE of Eps-SVR-sigmoid was 0.110, with the lowest convergence rate. The results of this study imply that this approach could be useful for measuring the severity of dementia by comprehensively examining axial atypical features, the Korean instrumental activities of daily living (K-IADL), changes in rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (RBD), etc. for optimal intervention and caring of the elderly living alone or patients with PDD residing in medically vulnerable areas.