A machine learning framework to determine geolocations from metagenomic profiling

BACKGROUND: Studies on metagenomic data of environmental microbial samples found that microbial communities seem to be geolocation-specific, and the microbiome abundance profile can be a differentiating feature to identify samples’ geolocations. In this paper, we present a machine learning framework to determine the geolocations from metagenomics profiling of microbial samples. RESULTS: Our method was applied to the multi-source microbiome data from MetaSUB (The Metagenomics and Metadesign of Subways and Urban Biomes) International Consortium for the CAMDA 2019 Metagenomic Forensics Challenge (the Challenge). The goal of the Challenge is to predict the geographical origins of mystery samples by constructing microbiome fingerprints.First, we extracted features from metagenomic abundance profiles. We then randomly split the training data into training and validation sets and trained the prediction models on the training set. Prediction performance was evaluated on the validation set. By using logistic regression with L2 normalization, the prediction accuracy of the model reaches 86%, averaged over 100 random splits of training and validation datasets.The testing data consists of samples from cities that do not occur in the training data. To predict the “mystery” cities that are not sampled before for the testing data, we first defined biological coordinates for sampled cities based on the similarity of microbial samples from them. Then we performed affine transform on the map such that the distance between cities measures their biological difference rather than geographical distance. After that, we derived the probabilities of a given testing sample from unsampled cities based on its predicted probabilities on sampled cities using Kriging interpolation. Results show that this method can successfully assign high probabilities to the true cities-of-origin of testing samples. CONCLUSION: Our framework shows good performance in predicting the geographic origin of metagenomic samples for cities where training data are available. Furthermore, we demonstrate the potential of the proposed method to predict metagenomic samples’ geolocations for samples from locations that are not in the training dataset. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at (doi:10.1186/s13062-020-00278-z).