Prediction of tau accumulation in prodromal Alzheimer’s disease using an ensemble machine learning approach

We developed machine learning (ML) algorithms to predict abnormal tau accumulation among patients with prodromal AD. We recruited 64 patients with prodromal AD using the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset. Supervised ML approaches based on the random forest (RF) and a gradient boosting machine (GBM) were used. The GBM resulted in an AUC of 0.61 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.579–0.647) with clinical data (age, sex, years of education) and a higher AUC of 0.817 (95% CI 0.804–0.830) with clinical and neuropsychological data. The highest AUC was 0.86 (95% CI 0.839–0.885) achieved with additional information such as cortical thickness in clinical data and neuropsychological results. Through the analysis of the impact order of the variables in each ML classifier, cortical thickness of the parietal lobe and occipital lobe and neuropsychological tests of memory domain were found to be more important features for each classifier. Our ML algorithms predicting tau burden may provide important information for the recruitment of participants in potential clinical trials of tau targeting therapies.