I'm thinking of an application for diabetics, that, given previous values of blood glucose and insulin dosage, predicts the glucose level for the next few hours.
I know a few things about neural networks and perceptrons, but not much. And there are probably whole other worlds of other machine learning methods. So I'd like to ask about what way should I try to go.
My problem is below:
The app would probably have a (very) simplified model over what is the reality (what food, how much of it, did some sport lately?, what kind of insulin, etc.) - and there are also some "expert knowledge" rules that I know but that wouldn't get programmed into it (eg. if you have too low glucose level, your body compensates and makes it into a too high glucose level). I want to try how far can I get just with the glucose measurements (when and how much) and insulin dosage (when and how much).
I guess the main question it would be nice if the program solved is "Given my glucose history, what glucose will I have in a few hours if I take X units of insulin?" (That could indirectly solve question "How many units of insulin should I take if I want to have a good glucose level in a few hours?" but that's more complicated matter.)
The food is an important part of the question, but I think it's closely linked to the insulin - the two balance out: if you eat food, you take insulin. You don't take insulin without eating (it's more complicated than that, but I'm trying to make it simple), so I guess it could work without putting in the data about food.
Now the data (at least timewise) isn't uniformly distributed. Ideally it should be (regular measurements at the morning, noon, evening, etc.) but more often than not the measurements get skipped. So the training dataset would have to deal with having "holes" in it. I guess that's ruling out some methods.
What do you recommend to try? (Again, this is not anything medically professional and "to be used in real life" - it's just a proof of concept for me and a toy project to try to do some machine learning.)
