Genetic Mechanism Revealed of Age-Related Macular Degeneration Based on Fusion of Statistics and Machine Learning Method

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most common cause of irreversible vision loss in the developed world which affects the quality of life for millions of elderly individuals worldwide. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified genetic variants at 34 loci contributing to AMD. To better understand the disease pathogenesis and identify causal genes for AMD, we applied random walk (RW) and support vector machine (SVM) to identify AMD-related genes based on gene interaction relationship and significance of genes. Our model achieved 0.927 of area under the curve (AUC), and 65 novel genes have been identified as AMD-related genes. To verify our results, a statistics method called summary data-based Mendelian randomization (SMR) has been implemented to integrate GWAS data and transcriptome data to verify AMD susceptibility-related genes. We found 45 genes are related to AMD by SMR. Among these genes, 37 genes overlap with those found by SVM-RW. Finally, we revealed the biological process of genetic mutations leading to changes in gene expression leading to AMD. Our results reveal the genetic pathogenic factors and related mechanisms of AMD.