A Data Mining Approach Identified Salivary Biomarkers That Discriminate between Two Obesity Measures

BACKGROUND: A key mechanism of obesity involves dysregulation of metabolic and inflammatory markers. This study aimed to identify salivary biomarkers and other factors associated with obesity using an ensemble data mining approach. METHODS: For a random cohort of over 700 subjects from 8137 Kuwait children (10.00 ± 0.67 years), four data mining methods were applied to identify important variables associated with obesity, including logistic regression by lasso regularization (Lasso), multivariate adaptive regression spline (MARS), random forests (RF), and boosting classification trees (BT). Each algorithm generated a variable importance rank list, based on an internal cross-validation procedure. An aggregated importance ranking was constructed by averaging the rank ordering of variables from individual list, weighted by the classification performance of respective models. Subsequently, the subset of top-ranking variables that were identified with at least three algorithms was evaluated by classification performance using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis with bootstrap percentile resampling. RESULTS: Obesity was defined either by the waist circumference (OBW) or by the body mass index (BMI) (OBWHO). We identified C-reactive protein (CRP), insulin, leptin, adiponectin, as salivary biomarkers associated with OBW, plus a clinical feature fitness level. A similar set of biomarkers was identified for OBWHO, but not including leptin. Tree-based clustering analysis revealed patterns that were significantly different between the OBW and OBWHO subjects. CONCLUSION: A data mining approach based on multiple algorithms is useful for identifying factors associated with phenotypes, especially in cases where relationships are not salient, and a consensus from multiple methods can help produce a more generalizable subset of features. In this case, we have demonstrated that evaluation using the waist circumference includes association with high levels of salivary leptin, which is not seen with evaluation by BMI.