External validation of a classifier of daily continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) profiles

As continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) sensors generate ever increasing amounts of CGM data, the need for methods to simplify the storage and analysis of this data becomes increasingly important. Lobo et al. developed a classifier of daily CGM profiles as an initial step in addressing this need. The classifier has several important applications including, but not limited to, data compression, data encryption, and indexing of databases. While the classifier has already successfully classified 99.0% of the 42,595 daily CGM profiles in a Test Set, this work presents an external validation using an external validation set (EVal Set) derived from 8 publicly available data sets. The Test Set and the EVal Set differ in terms of (but not limited to) demographics, data collection time periods, and data collection geographies. The classifier successfully classified 98.2% of the 137,030 daily CGM profiles in the EVal Set. Furthermore, each of the 483 distinct groups of classified daily CGM profiles from the EVal Set retains the same clinical characteristics as the corresponding group from the Test Set, as desired. Finally, the set of unclassified daily CGM profiles from the EVal Set retains the same statistical characteristics as the set of unclassified daily CGM profiles from the Test Set, as desired. These results establish the robustness and generalizability of the classifier: the performance of the classifier is unchanged despite the marked differences between the Test Set and the EVal Set.