Risk score-embedded deep learning for biological age estimation: Development and validation

The health index measures a person's overall health status which provides useful information for people to manage their health, so developing a precise and relevant health index is urgent. Currently, many researchers have studied the biological age (BA) estimation, one of the beneficial health indices, by applying machine learning and deep learning techniques to health data. However, most of them have focused on the chronological age prediction or basic latent feature extraction methods. In this paper, we present a new algorithm to estimate BA, called Risk Score-Embedded Autoencoder-based BA (RSAE-BA). RSAE-BA can provide an accurate health index by using deep representation learning with an individual's health risk. We first proposed a notion of risk score (RS) calculation to monitor a person's health risk. Then we extracted latent features by using an autoencoder embedding the RS, and used them to generate BA. To evaluate RSAE-BA, we presented a new BA validation method using the RS, which is applicable to both unlabeled and labeled data. We compared the results of RSAE-BA with existing methods, and demonstrated the accuracy of RSAE-BA and its applicability to predict disease incidence. We believe that RSAE-BA will be a useful alternative method to measure a person's health.