English

Accelerometry-Derived Digital Biomarkers for Cardiometabolic Risk: A Population-Representative Tabular Benchmark with Uncertainty Quantification

Machine Learning 2026-06-29 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Structured tabular data dominates clinical medicine, yet existing benchmarks fail to reflect real-world properties like complex survey sampling, demographic oversampling, and subgroup fairness. We introduce the NHANES Accelerometry Cardiometabolic Benchmark, derived from NHANES 2003-2006, comprising 1,381 adults with hip-worn accelerometry, fasting laboratory biomarkers, dietary intake, and anthropometrics. We evaluate three tabular learning methods -- ridge regression, XGBoost, and the foundation model TabPFN v2 -- to predict glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c), fasting triglycerides, and C-reactive protein (CRP) from activity phenotypes and lifestyle covariates. TabPFN v2 achieves the best overall performance (HbA1c R^2=0.156, CRP R^2=0.383), while triglycerides remain largely unpredictable (R^2 < 0.05), consistent with known genetic dominance. We apply split conformal prediction to generate distribution-free 90% prediction intervals and evaluate demographic coverage equity across sex and race/ethnicity subgroups. Marginal coverage aligns with the 90% target for CRP and HbA1c but falls below for triglycerides. At the subgroup level, we observe localized undercoverage (e.g., HbA1c for Mexican American participants), illustrating the gap between marginal guarantees and the conditional coverage required for clinical fairness. Code and data are at https://github.com/felizzi/nhanes-accel-cardiometabolic-benchmark.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2606.30702,
  title  = {Accelerometry-Derived Digital Biomarkers for Cardiometabolic Risk: A Population-Representative Tabular Benchmark with Uncertainty Quantification},
  author = {Federico Felizzi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.30702},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted at the SD4H Workshop at ICML 2026