No Arabic abstract
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) offer new opportunities to identify genetic risk factors for Alzheimers disease (AD). Recently, collaborative efforts across different institutions emerged that enhance the power of many existing techniques on individual institution data. However, a major barrier to collaborative studies of GWAS is that many institutions need to preserve individual data privacy. To address this challenge, we propose a novel distributed framework, termed Local Query Model (LQM) to detect risk SNPs for AD across multiple research institutions. To accelerate the learning process, we propose a Distributed Enhanced Dual Polytope Projection (D-EDPP) screening rule to identify irrelevant features and remove them from the optimization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first successful run of the computationally intensive model selection procedure to learn a consistent model across different institutions without compromising their privacy while ranking the SNPs that may collectively affect AD. Empirical studies are conducted on 809 subjects with 5.9 million SNP features which are distributed across three individual institutions. D-EDPP achieved a 66-fold speed-up by effectively identifying irrelevant features.
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have achieved great success in the genetic study of Alzheimers disease (AD). Collaborative imaging genetics studies across different research institutions show the effectiveness of detecting genetic risk factors. However, the high dimensionality of GWAS data poses significant challenges in detecting risk SNPs for AD. Selecting relevant features is crucial in predicting the response variable. In this study, we propose a novel Distributed Feature Selection Framework (DFSF) to conduct the large-scale imaging genetics studies across multiple institutions. To speed up the learning process, we propose a family of distributed group Lasso screening rules to identify irrelevant features and remove them from the optimization. Then we select the relevant group features by performing the group Lasso feature selection process in a sequence of parameters. Finally, we employ the stability selection to rank the top risk SNPs that might help detect the early stage of AD. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first distributed feature selection model integrated with group Lasso feature selection as well as detecting the risk genetic factors across multiple research institutions system. Empirical studies are conducted on 809 subjects with 5.9 million SNPs which are distributed across several individual institutions, demonstrating the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method.
We model Alzheimers disease (AD) progression by combining differential equations (DEs) and reinforcement learning (RL) with domain knowledge. DEs provide relationships between some, but not all, factors relevant to AD. We assume that the missing relationships must satisfy general criteria about the working of the brain, for e.g., maximizing cognition while minimizing the cost of supporting cognition. This allows us to extract the missing relationships by using RL to optimize an objective (reward) function that captures the above criteria. We use our model consisting of DEs (as a simulator) and the trained RL agent to predict individualized 10-year AD progression using baseline (year 0) features on synthetic and real data. The model was comparable or better at predicting 10-year cognition trajectories than state-of-the-art learning-based models. Our interpretable model demonstrated, and provided insights into, recovery/compensatory processes that mitigate the effect of AD, even though those processes were not explicitly encoded in the model. Our framework combines DEs with RL for modelling AD progression and has broad applicability for understanding other neurological disorders.
Valuable training data is often owned by independent organizations and located in multiple data centers. Most deep learning approaches require to centralize the multi-datacenter data for performance purpose. In practice, however, it is often infeasible to transfer all data to a centralized data center due to not only bandwidth limitation but also the constraints of privacy regulations. Model averaging is a conventional choice for data parallelized training, but its ineffectiveness is claimed by previous studies as deep neural networks are often non-convex. In this paper, we argue that model averaging can be effective in the decentralized environment by using two strategies, namely, the cyclical learning rate and the increased number of epochs for local model training. With the two strategies, we show that model averaging can provide competitive performance in the decentralized mode compared to the data-centralized one. In a practical environment with multiple data centers, we conduct extensive experiments using state-of-the-art deep network architectures on different types of data. Results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.
Guidelines for the management of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) recommend the use of risk stratification models to identify patients most likely to benefit from cholesterol-lowering and other therapies. These models have differential performance across race and gender groups with inconsistent behavior across studies, potentially resulting in an inequitable distribution of beneficial therapy. In this work, we leverage adversarial learning and a large observational cohort extracted from electronic health records (EHRs) to develop a fair ASCVD risk prediction model with reduced variability in error rates across groups. We empirically demonstrate that our approach is capable of aligning the distribution of risk predictions conditioned on the outcome across several groups simultaneously for models built from high-dimensional EHR data. We also discuss the relevance of these results in the context of the empirical trade-off between fairness and model performance.
Alzheimers disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia and is phenotypically heterogeneous. APOE is a triallelic gene which correlates with phenotypic heterogeneity in AD. In this work, we determined the effect of APOE alleles on the disease progression timeline of AD using a discriminative event-based model (DEBM). Since DEBM is a data-driven model, stratification into smaller disease subgroups would lead to more inaccurate models as compared to fitting the model on the entire dataset. Hence our secondary aim is to propose and evaluate novel approaches in which we split the different steps of DEBM into group-aspecific and group-specific parts, where the entire dataset is used to train the group-aspecific parts and only the data from a specific group is used to train the group-specific parts of the DEBM. We performed simulation experiments to benchmark the accuracy of the proposed approaches and to select the optimal approach. Subsequently, the chosen approach was applied to the baseline data of 417 cognitively normal, 235 mild cognitively impaired who convert to AD within 3 years, and 342 AD patients from the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset to gain new insights into the effect of APOE carriership on the disease progression timeline of AD. The presented models could aid understanding of the disease, and in selecting homogeneous group of presymptomatic subjects at-risk of developing symptoms for clinical trials.