The forecasting of menstruation based on a state-space modeling of basal body temperature time series

Abstract: Women's basal body temperature (BBT) follows a periodic pattern that is associated with the events in their menstrual cycle. Although daily BBT time series contain potentially useful information for estimating the underlying menstrual phase and for predicting the length of current menstrual cycle, few models have been constructed for BBT time series. Here, we propose a state-space model that includes menstrual phase as a latent state variable to explain fluctuations in BBT and menstrual cycle length. Conditional distributions for the menstrual phase were obtained by using sequential Bayesian filtering techniques. A predictive distribution for the upcoming onset of menstruation was then derived based on the conditional distributions and the model, leading to a novel statistical framework that provided a sequentially updated prediction of the day of onset of menstruation. We applied this framework to a real dataset comprising women's self-reported BBT and days of menstruation, comparing the prediction accuracy of our proposed method with that of conventional calendar calculation. We found that our proposed method provided a better prediction of the day of onset of menstruation. Potential extensions of this framework may provide the basis of modeling and predicting other events that are associated with the menstrual cycle.