Supervised Kernel PCA For Longitudinal Data

Abstract: In statistical learning, high covariate dimensionality poses challenges for robust prediction and inference. To address this challenge, supervised dimension reduction is often performed, where dependence on the outcome is maximized for a selected covariate subspace with smaller dimensionality. Prevalent dimension reduction techniques assume data are $i.i.d.$, which is not appropriate for longitudinal data comprising multiple subjects with repeated measurements over time. In this paper, we derive a decomposition of the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion as a supervised loss function for longitudinal data, enabling dimension reduction between and within clusters separately, and propose a dimensionality-reduction technique, $sklPCA$, that performs this decomposed dimension reduction. We also show that this technique yields superior model accuracy compared to the model it extends.