A Comparative Study of Deep Learning Architectures for Multi-Horizon Behavioural Forecasting for Mobile Health

Abstract:Wearable devices and smartphones generate rich behavioural time series that can support proactive health interventions, yet systematic comparisons of modern forecasting architectures for these data are lacking. In particular, it remains unclear how models generalise across populations, how different architectures respond to participant-level fine-tuning and how forecasting accuracy degrades across multi-day horizons. We benchmark six deep learning architectures, two zero-shot Foundation Models (FM) and statistical baselines on three public datasets encompassing over 800 participants, reporting per-feature metrics for step counts, screen time and sleep duration across 1-8 day horizons. We further conduct a per-feature personalisation study across all six architectures and assess FM transferability across dataset sizes and temporal granularities. Our key findings are: (i) no single architecture dominates, PatchTST leads among trained models while the three runners-up (TCN, MLP, Transformer) show no meaningful performance difference; (ii) the FM TimesFM matches or exceeds trained models zero-shot, especially in low-data regimes and (iii) participant-level fine-tuning reduces per-feature RMSE by 16-60\%, with sleep benefiting most and step counts least. These results provide practical guidance on architecture selection, FM applicability and personalisation strategies for mobile health forecasting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to jointly evaluate modern deep learning, FMs and personalisation for multi-horizon behavioural forecasting from wearables.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

I.2.6; I.5.1; J.3

arXiv:2606.14604 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2606.14604v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.14604 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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