Lognormal Neural Point Process Models for Interpretable Heartbeat Dynamics

Neural temporal point processes (NTPPs) are powerful tools for modeling sequences of timestamped events with statistical temporal structure. Density-based NTPPs, in particular, are an interesting opportunity to merge the universal function approximation capability of neural networks with a defined statistical model in a way that has many potential applications. We demonstrate one such application to heartbeat dynamics, a physiologic point process. We specifically apply a lognormal mixture NTPP to compute instantaneous estimates of the mean and standard deviation of beat-to-beat intervals. We compare our results to the state of art (Barbieri et al.) point process model for heartbeat dynamics, which uses a more physiologically rigorous inverse Gaussian model. We find that the NTPP model maintains reasonable accuracy while improving upon robustness to noise.