Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a complex neurodegenerative disorder that affects thinking, memory, and behavior. Limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy (LATE) is a recently identified common neurodegenerative disease that mimics the clinical symptoms of AD. The development of drugs to prevent or treat these neurodegenerative diseases has been slow, partly because the genes associated with these diseases are incompletely understood. A notable hindrance from data analysis perspective is that, usually, the clinical samples for patients and controls are highly imbalanced, thus rendering it challenging to apply most existing machine learning algorithms to directly analyze such datasets. Meeting this data analysis challenge is critical, as more specific disease-associated gene identification may enable new insights into underlying disease-driving mechanisms and help find biomarkers and, in turn, improve prospects for effective treatment strategies. In order to detect disease-associated genes based on imbalanced transcriptome-wide data, we proposed an integrated multiple random forests (IMRF) algorithm. IMRF is effective in differentiating putative genes associated with subjects having LATE and/or AD from controls based on transcriptome-wide data, thereby enabling effective discrimination between these samples. Various forms of validations, such as cross-domain verification of our method over other datasets, improved and competitive classification performance by using identified genes, effectiveness of testing data with a classifier that is completely independent from decision trees and random forests, and relationships with prior AD and LATE studies on the genes linked to neurodegeneration, all testify to the effectiveness of IMRF in identifying genes with altered expression in LATE and/or AD. We conclude that IMRF, as an effective feature selection algorithm for imbalanced data, is promising to facilitate the development of new gene biomarkers as well as targets for effective strategies of disease prevention and treatment.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-7-2021

Notes/Citation Information

Published in PLOS ONE, v. 16, issue 9, e0256648.

© 2021 Wu et al.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256648

Funding Information

XW and QC were partially supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants R21AG070909, R56NS117587, R01HD101508, and UH3 NS100606-03.

Related Content

The data contain sensitive patient information and cannot be shared publicly. However, the data are available via application for other researchers who meet the criteria for access to confidential data through the AD Knowledge Portal Institutional Data Access / Ethics Committee (https://www.synapse.org/#!Synapse:syn3219045). Additional data access inquiries may be sent to this address.

pone.0256648.s001.pdf (2306 kB)
Supplementary material. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256648.s001

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