Generating Accurate Personalized Predictions of Future Behavior: A Smoking Exemplar

The present study sought to apply statistical classification methods to idiographic time series data in order to make accurate future predictions of behavior. We recruited 70 individuals who presented as regular smokers; 52 completed experience sampling method (ESM) data collection and provided sufficient time series data. Time stamps from ESM surveys were used to calculate the time of day, day of the week, and continuous time—where the last datum was, in turn, used to calculate 12-hr and 24-hr cycles. Each individual’s time series was split into sequential training and testing sections, so that trained models could be tested on future observations. Prediction models were trained on the first 75% of the individual’s data and tested on the last 25%. Predictions of future behavior were made on a person by person basis. Two prediction algorithms were employed, elastic net regularization and naïve Bayes classification. Sample-wide area under the curve was nearly 80%, with some models demonstrating perfect prediction accuracies. Sensitivity and specificity were between 0.78 and 0.81 across the two approaches. Importantly, prediction models were based on a lagged data structure. Thus, in addition to supporting the prediction accuracy of our models with out-of-sample tests in time-forward data, the models themselves were time-lagged, such that each prediction was for the subsequent measurement. Such a system could be the basis for mobile, just-in-time interventions for substance use, as models that accurately predict future behavior could ostensibly be used for delivering personalized interventions at empirically-indicated moments of need.