A Machine Learning Pipeline for Discriminant Pathways Identification

Identifying the molecular pathways more prone to disruption during a pathological process is a key task in network medicine and, more in general, in systems biology. In this work we propose a pipeline that couples a machine learning solution for molecular profiling with a recent network comparison method. The pipeline can identify changes occurring between specific sub-modules of networks built in a case-control biomarker study, discriminating key groups of genes whose interactions are modified by an underlying condition. The proposal is independent from the classification algorithm used. Two applications on genomewide data are presented regarding children susceptibility to air pollution and early and late onset of Parkinson’s disease.