There is an emerging need in clinical research to accurately predict patients' disease status and disease progression by optimally integrating multivariate clinical information. Clinical data are often collected over time for multiple biomarkers of different types (e.g. continuous, binary and counts). In this paper, we present a flexible and dynamic (time-dependent) discriminant analysis approach in which multiple biomarkers of various types are jointly modelled for classification purposes by the multivariate generalized linear mixed model. We propose a mixture of normal distributions for the random effects to allow additional flexibility when modelling the complex correlation between longitudinal biomarkers and to robustify the model and the classification procedure against misspecification of the random effects distribution. These longitudinal models are subsequently used in a multivariate time-dependent discriminant scheme to predict, at any time point, the probability of belonging to a particular risk group. The methodology is illustrated using clinical data from patients with epilepsy, where the aim is to identify patients who will not achieve remission of seizures within a five-year follow-up period.
Keywords: Discriminant analysis; mixture distributions; multivariate generalized linear mixed model; multivariate longitudinal data; random effects.