Machine Learning Prediction of Parkinson's Disease Onset and Subtype Using Germline Variants

AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWParkinsons Disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder in the United States, and is characterized by a largely irreversible worsening of motor and non-motor symptoms as the disease progresses. A prominent characteristic of the disease is its high heterogeneity in manifestation as well as the progression rate. For sporadic Parkinsons Disease, which comprises 90% of all diagnoses, the relationship between the patient genome and disease onset or progression subtype remains largely elusive. Machine learning algorithms are increasingly adopted to study the genomics of diseases due to their ability to capture patterns within the vast feature space of the human genome that might be contributing to the phenotype of interest. In our study, we develop two machine learning models that predict the onset as well as the progression subtype of Parkinsons Disease based on subjects germline mutations. Our best models achieved an ROC of 0.77 and 0.61 for disease onset and subtype prediction, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, our models present state-of-the-art prediction performances of PD onset and subtype solely based on the subjects germline variants. The genes with high importance in our best-performing models were enriched for several canonical pathways related to signaling, immune system, and protein modifications, all of which have been previously associated with PD symptoms or pathogenesis. These high-importance gene sets provide us with promising candidate genes for future biomedical and clinical research.