Bayesian Multivariate Growth Mixture Modeling of Longitudinal Data: An Application to Alzheimer’s Disease Study

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) studies often collect longitudinal biomarker measures of multiple cohorts at different stages of disease and follow these biomarkers with a relatively short period of time. The heterogeneity of the longitudinal patterns of biomarkers can be ubiquitous across both individual trajectories and cognitive domains. We propose a flexible Bayesian multivariate growth mixture model to identify distinct longitudinal patterns of data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) study. A Gibbs sampling is implemented for achieving the Bayesian inference. We perform a simulation study to demonstrate the adequate performance of our proposed approach and apply the model to identify three latent cognitive decline patterns among patients from the ADNI study.