Meta-Signer: Metagenomic Signature Identifier based onrank aggregation of features

Abstract

The advance of metagenomic studies provides the opportunity to identify microbial taxa that are associated with human diseases. Multiple methods exist for the association analysis. However, the results could be inconsistent, presenting challenges in interpreting the host-microbiome interactions. To address this issue, we develop Meta-Signer, a novel Metagenomic Signature Identifier tool based on rank aggregation of features identified from multiple machine learning models including Random Forest, Support Vector Machines, Logistic Regression, and Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Networks. Meta-Signer generates ranked taxa lists by training individual machine learning models over multiple training partitions and aggregates the ranked lists into a single list by an optimization procedure to represent the most informative and robust microbial features. A User will receive speedy assessment on the predictive performance of each ma-chine learning model using different numbers of the ranked features and determine the final models to be used for evaluation on external datasets. Meta-Signer is user-friendly and customizable, allowing users to explore their datasets quickly and efficiently.