An Algorithm for Optimally Fitting a Wiener Model

The purpose of this work is to present a new methodology for fitting Wiener networks to datasets with a large number of variables. Wiener networks have the ability to model a wide range of data types, and their structures can yield parameters with phenomenological meaning. There are several challenges to fitting such a model: model stiffness, the nonlinear nature of a Wiener network, possible overfitting, and the large number of parameters inherent with large input sets. This work describes a methodology to overcome these challenges by using several iterative algorithms under supervised learning and fitting subsets of the parameters at a time. This methodology is applied to Wiener networks that are used to predict blood glucose concentrations. The predictions of validation sets from models fit to four subjects using this methodology yielded a higher correlation between observed and predicted observations than other algorithms, including the Gauss-Newton and Levenberg-Marquardt algorithms.