PREgDICT : Early prediction of gestational weight gain for pregnancy care

Excessive or inadequate Gestational Weight Gain (GWG) is considered to not only put the mothers, but also the infants at increased risks with a number of adverse outcomes. In this paper, we use self-reported weight measurements from the early days of pregnancy to predict and classify the end-of-pregnancy weight gain into an underweight, normal or obese category in accordance with the Institute of Medicine recommended guidelines. Self-reported weight measurements suffer from issues such as lack of enough data and non-uniformity. We propose and compare two novel parametric and non-parametric approaches that utilise self-training data along with population data to tackle limited data availability. We, dynamically find the subset of closest time series from the population weight-gain data to a given subject. Then, a non-parametric Gaussian Process (GP) regression model, learnt on the selected subset is used to forecast the self-reported weight measurements of given subject. Our novel approach produces mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.572 kgs in forecasting end-of-pregnancy weight gain and achieves weight-category-classification accuracy of 63.75% mid-way through the pregnancy, whereas a state-of-the-art approach is only 53.75% accurate and produces high MAE of 16.22 kgs. Our method ensures reliable prediction of the end-of-pregnancy weight gain using few data points and can assist in early intervention that can prevent gaining or losing excessive weight during pregnancy.