The effect of mislabeled phenotypic status on the identification of mutation-carriers from SNP genotypes in dairy cattle

BACKGROUND: Statistical and machine learning applications are increasingly popular in animal breeding and genetics, especially to compute genomic predictions for phenotypes of interest. Noise (errors) in the data may have a negative impact on the accuracy of predictions. The effects of noisy data have been investigated in genome-wide association studies for case–control experiments, and in genomic predictions for binary traits in plants. No studies have been published yet on the impact of noisy data in animal genomics. In this work, the susceptibility to noise of five classification models (Lasso-penalised logistic regression—Lasso, K-nearest neighbours—KNN, random forest—RF, support vector machines with linear—SVML—or radial—SVMR—kernel) was tested. As illustration, the identification of carriers of a recessive mutation in cattle (Bos taurus) was used. A population of 3116 Fleckvieh animals with SNP genotypes on the same chromosome as the mutation locus (BTA 19) was available. The carrier status (0/1 phenotype) was randomly sampled to generate noise. Increasing proportions of noise—up to 20%— were introduced in the data. RESULTS: SVMR and Lasso were relatively more robust to noise in the data, with total accuracy still above 0.975 and TPR (true positive rate; accuracy in the minority class) in the range 0.5–0.80 also with 17.5–20% mislabeled observations. The performance of SVML and RF decreased monotonically with increasing noise in the data, while KNN constantly failed to identify mutation carriers (observations in the minority class). The computation time increased with noise in the data, especially for the two support vector machines classifiers. CONCLUSIONS: This work was the first to assess the impact of phenotyping errors on the accuracy of genomic predictions in animal genetics. The choice of the classification method can influence results in terms of higher or lower susceptibility to noise. In the presented problem, SVM with radial kernel performed relatively well even when the proportion of errors in the data reached 12.5%. Lasso was the second best method, while SVML, RF and KNN were very sensitive to noise. Taking into account both accuracy and computation time, Lasso provided the best combination. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13104-017-2540-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.