Hierarchical Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis of Longitudinal Data

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Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Xinyu, Qaqish, Ameer, Lin, D. Y., Li, Didong
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Zhang, Xinyu
Qaqish, Ameer
Lin, D. Y.
Li, Didong
author_facet Zhang, Xinyu
Qaqish, Ameer
Lin, D. Y.
Li, Didong
contents In many longitudinal studies, a large number of variables are measured repeatedly over time, with substantial missing data. Existing methods, such as probabilistic principal component analysis (PPCA), are ill-equipped to handle such incomplete, high-dimensional longitudinal data, as they fail to account for the nested sources of variation and temporal dependency inherent in repeated measures. We introduce hierarchical probabilistic principal component analysis (HPPCA), a two-level probabilistic factor model that explicitly separates between-subject variance from time-varying within-subject dynamics. The within-subject latent factors are modeled by a Gaussian process. We develop an EM algorithm to handle missing data and flexible covariance kernels, accelerated by computationally efficient initializers. Simulation studies demonstrated that HPPCA robustly recovers model parameters subspaces and substantially outperforms both standard PPCA and multivariate functional PCA in imputation accuracy, even under heavy missingness and model misspecification. An application to the long COVID symptoms in the Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery adult cohort revealed that HPPCA effectively captured the data's hierarchical structure and its learned features significantly improved the prediction of clinical outcomes and the recovery of masked clinical records compared to exisiting methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_22015
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hierarchical Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis of Longitudinal Data
Zhang, Xinyu
Qaqish, Ameer
Lin, D. Y.
Li, Didong
Methodology
Applications
Machine Learning
In many longitudinal studies, a large number of variables are measured repeatedly over time, with substantial missing data. Existing methods, such as probabilistic principal component analysis (PPCA), are ill-equipped to handle such incomplete, high-dimensional longitudinal data, as they fail to account for the nested sources of variation and temporal dependency inherent in repeated measures. We introduce hierarchical probabilistic principal component analysis (HPPCA), a two-level probabilistic factor model that explicitly separates between-subject variance from time-varying within-subject dynamics. The within-subject latent factors are modeled by a Gaussian process. We develop an EM algorithm to handle missing data and flexible covariance kernels, accelerated by computationally efficient initializers. Simulation studies demonstrated that HPPCA robustly recovers model parameters subspaces and substantially outperforms both standard PPCA and multivariate functional PCA in imputation accuracy, even under heavy missingness and model misspecification. An application to the long COVID symptoms in the Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery adult cohort revealed that HPPCA effectively captured the data's hierarchical structure and its learned features significantly improved the prediction of clinical outcomes and the recovery of masked clinical records compared to exisiting methods.
title Hierarchical Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis of Longitudinal Data
topic Methodology
Applications
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22015