DISCUSSION

Both these clocks use the same set of 50 psychosocial features to estimate human chronological age and subjective age, respectively. These clocks showed superior performance during CV in MIDUS 1 (MAE_PsychoAge= 6.70 years; MAE_SubjAge= 7.32 years) and were verified in two other large data sets – MIDUS 2 and MIDUS Refresher ( Table 1 ). In terms of epsilon accuracy, PsychoAge reached a score of 0.78 in MIDUS 1, and SubjAge – 0.74.

Having trained and verified the final models, we aimed to understand how PsychoAge and SubjAge see human aging and what features they pay the most attention to. With a tandem PFI-DFS approach we ranked all features according to their relative importance. Continue reading →