Identifying Taxonomic Biomarkers of Colorectal Cancer in Human Intestinal Microbiota Using Multiple Feature Selection Methods

A variety of bacterial species called gut microbiota work together to maintain a steady intestinal environment. The gastrointestinal tract contains tremendous amount of different species including archaea, bacteria, fungi, and viruses. While these organisms are crucial immune system stabilizers, the dysbiosis of the intestinal flora has been related to gastrointestinal disorders including Colorectal cancer (CRC), intestinal cancer, irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease. In the last decade, next-generation sequencing (NGS) methods have accelerated the identification of human gut flora. CRC is a deathly condition that has been on the rise in the last century, affecting half a million people each year. Since early CRC diagnosis is critical for an effective treatment, there is an immediate requirement for a classification system that can expedite CRC diagnosis. In this study, via analyzing the available metagenomics data on CRC, we aim to facilitate the CRC diagnosis via finding biomarkers linked with CRC, and via building a classification model. We have obtained the metagenomic sequencing data of the healthy individuals and CRC patients from a metagenome-wide association analysis and we have classified this data according to the disease stages. Conditional Mutual Information Maximization (CMIM), Fast Correlation Based Filter (FCBF), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), min redundancy max relevance (mRMR), Information Gain (IG) and Select K Best (SKB) feature selection algorithms were utilized to cope with the complexity of the features. We observed that the SKB, IG, and XGBoost techniques made significant contributions to decrease the microbiota in use for CRC diagnosis, thereby reducing cost and time. We realized that our Random Forest classifier outperformed Adaboost, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, Logitboost and stacking ensemble classifiers in terms of CRC classification performance. Our results reiterated some known and some potential microbiome associated mechanisms in CRC, which could aid the design of new diagnostics based on the microbiome.