Comparative analysis of machine learning approaches for predicting respiratory virus infection and symptom severity

Respiratory diseases are among the major health problems causing a burden on hospitals. Diagnosis of infection and rapid prediction of severity without time-consuming clinical tests could be beneficial in preventing the spread and progression of the disease, especially in countries where health systems remain incapable. Personalized medicine studies involving statistics and computer technologies could help to address this need. In addition to individual studies, competitions are also held such as Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods (DREAM) challenge which is a community-driven organization with a mission to research biology, bioinformatics, and biomedicine. One of these competitions was the Respiratory Viral DREAM Challenge, which aimed to develop early predictive biomarkers for respiratory virus infections. These efforts are promising, however, the prediction performance of the computational methods developed for detecting respiratory diseases still has room for improvement. In this study, we focused on improving the performance of predicting the infection and symptom severity of individuals infected with various respiratory viruses using gene expression data collected before and after exposure. The publicly available gene expression dataset in the Gene Expression Omnibus, named GSE73072, containing samples exposed to four respiratory viruses (H1N1, H3N2, human rhinovirus (HRV), and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)) was used as input data. Various preprocessing methods and machine learning algorithms were implemented and compared to achieve the best prediction performance. The experimental results showed that the proposed approaches obtained a prediction performance of 0.9746 area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) for infection (i.e., shedding) prediction (SC-1), 0.9182 AUPRC for symptom class prediction (SC-2), and 0.6733 Pearson correlation for symptom score prediction (SC-3) by outperforming the best leaderboard scores of Respiratory Viral DREAM Challenge (a 4.48% improvement for SC-1, a 13.68% improvement for SC-2, and a 13.98% improvement for SC-3). Additionally, over-representation analysis (ORA), which is a statistical method for objectively determining whether certain genes are more prevalent in pre-defined sets such as pathways, was applied using the most significant genes selected by feature selection methods. The results show that pathways associated with the 'adaptive immune system' and 'immune disease' are strongly linked to pre-infection and symptom development. These findings contribute to our knowledge about predicting respiratory infections and are expected to facilitate the development of future studies that concentrate on predicting not only infections but also the associated symptoms.

IGPRED: Combination of convolutional neural and graph convolutional networks for protein secondary structure prediction

There is a close relationship between the tertiary structure and the function of a protein. One of the important steps to determine the tertiary structure is protein secondary structure prediction (PSSP). For this reason, predicting secondary structure with higher accuracy will give valuable information about the tertiary structure. Recently, deep learning techniques have obtained promising improvements in several machine learning applications including PSSP. In this article, a novel deep learning model, based on convolutional neural network and graph convolutional network is proposed. PSIBLAST PSSM, HHMAKE PSSM, physico-chemical properties of amino acids are combined with structural profiles to generate a rich feature set. Furthermore, the hyper-parameters of the proposed network are optimized using Bayesian optimization. The proposed model IGPRED obtained 89.19%, 86.34%, 87.87%, 85.76%, and 86.54% Q3 accuracies for CullPDB, EVAset, CASP10, CASP11, and CASP12 datasets, respectively.

Crowdsourcing digital health measures to predict Parkinson's disease severity: the Parkinson's Disease Digital Biomarker DREAM Challenge

Consumer wearables and sensors are a rich source of data about patients' daily disease and symptom burden, particularly in the case of movement disorders like Parkinson's disease (PD). However, interpreting these complex data into so-called digital biomarkers requires complicated analytical approaches, and validating these biomarkers requires sufficient data and unbiased evaluation methods. Here we describe the use of crowdsourcing to specifically evaluate and benchmark features derived from accelerometer and gyroscope data in two different datasets to predict the presence of PD and severity of three PD symptoms: tremor, dyskinesia, and bradykinesia. Forty teams from around the world submitted features, and achieved drastically improved predictive performance for PD status (best AUROC = 0.87), as well as tremor- (best AUPR = 0.75), dyskinesia- (best AUPR = 0.48) and bradykinesia-severity (best AUPR = 0.95).

A crowdsourced analysis to identify ab initio molecular signatures predictive of susceptibility to viral infection

The response to respiratory viruses varies substantially between individuals, and there are currently no known molecular predictors from the early stages of infection. Here we conduct a community-based analysis to determine whether pre- or early post-exposure molecular factors could predict physiologic responses to viral exposure. Using peripheral blood gene expression profiles collected from healthy subjects prior to exposure to one of four respiratory viruses (H1N1, H3N2, Rhinovirus, and RSV), as well as up to 24 h following exposure, we find that it is possible to construct models predictive of symptomatic response using profiles even prior to viral exposure. Analysis of predictive gene features reveal little overlap among models; however, in aggregate, these genes are enriched for common pathways. Heme metabolism, the most significantly enriched pathway, is associated with a higher risk of developing symptoms following viral exposure. This study demonstrates that pre-exposure molecular predictors can be identified and improves our understanding of the mechanisms of response to respiratory viruses.