Structured Grammatical Evolution for Glucose Prediction in Diabetic Patients

Structured grammatical evolution is a recent grammar-based genetic programming variant that tackles the main drawbacks of Grammatical Evolution, by relying on a one-to-one mapping between each gene and a non-terminal symbol of the grammar. It was applied, with success, in previous works with a set of classical benchmarks problems. However, assessing performance on hard real-world problems is still missing. In this paper, we fill in this gap, by analyzing the performance of SGE when generating predictive models for the glucose levels of diabetic patients. Our algorithm uses features that take into account the past glucose values, insulin injections, and the amount of carbohydrate ingested by a patient. The results show that SGE can evolve models that can predict the glucose more accurately when compared with previous grammar-based approaches used for the same problem. Additionally, we also show that the models tend to be more robust, since the behavior in the training and test data is very similar, with a small variance.