Prediction of Alzheimer’s Disease from Single Cell Transcriptomics Using Deep Learning
Authors: Srivastava Aman , Dhall Anjali , Patiyal Sumeet , Arora Akanksha , Jarwal Akanksha , Raghava Gajendra P. S. 
Published: July 2023

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurological disorder characterized by brain cell death, brain atrophy, and cognitive decline. Early diagnosis of AD remains a significant challenge in effectively managing this debilitating disease. In this study, we aimed to harness the potential of single-cell transcriptomics data from 12 Alzheimer’s patients and 9 normal controls (NC) to develop a predictive model for identifying AD patients. The dataset comprised gene expression profiles of 33,538 genes across 169,469 cells, with 90,713 cells belonging to AD patients and 78,783 cells belonging to NC individuals. Employing machine learning and deep learning techniques, we developed prediction models. Initially, we performed data processing to identify genes expressed in most cells. These genes were then ranked based on their ability to classify AD and NC groups. Subsequently, two sets of genes, consisting of 35 and 100 genes, respectively, were used to develop machine learning-based models. Although these models demonstrated high performance on the training dataset, their performance on the validation/independent dataset was notably poor, indicating potential overoptimization. To address this challenge, we developed a deep learning method utilizing dropout regularization technique. Our deep learning approach achieved an AUC of 0.75 and 0.84 on the validation dataset using the sets of 35 and 100 genes, respectively. Furthermore, we conducted gene ontology enrichment analysis on the selected genes to elucidate their biological roles and gain insights into the underlying mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease. While this study presents a prototype method for predicting AD using single-cell genomics data, it is important to note that the limited size of the dataset represents a major limitation. To facilitate the scientific community, we have created a website to provide with code and service. It is freely available athttps://webs.iiitd.edu.in/raghava/alzscpred.

Key Points

Predictive Model for Alzheimer’s Disease Using Single Cell Transcriptomics Data

Overoptimization of models trained on single-cell genomics data.

Application of dropout regularization technique of ANN for reducing overoptimization

Ranking of genes based on their ability to predict patients’ Alzheimer’s Disease

Standalone software package for predicting Alzheimer’s Disease

Author’s Biography

Aman Srivastava is pursuing M. Tech. in Computational Biology from Department of Computational Biology, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, India.

Anjali Dhall is currently working as Ph.D. in Computational Biology from Department of Computational Biology, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, India.

Sumeet Patiyal is currently working as Ph.D. in Computational Biology from Department of Computational Biology, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, India.

Akanksha Arora is currently working as Ph.D. in Computational Biology from Department of Computational Biology, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, India.

Akanksha Jarwal is pursuing M. Tech. in Computational Biology from Department of Computational Biology, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, India.

Gajendra P. S. Raghava is currently working as Professor and Head of Department of Computational Biology, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, India.