Explainable machine learning with pairwise interactions for the classification of Parkinson’s disease and SWEDD from clinical and imaging features

Scans without evidence of dopaminergic deficit (SWEDD) refers to patients who mimics motor and non-motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD) but showing integrity of dopaminergic system. For this reason, the differential diagnosis between SWEDD and PD patients is often not possible in absence of dopamine imaging. Machine Learning (ML) showed optimal performance in automatically distinguishing these two diseases from clinical and imaging data. However, the most common applied ML algorithms provide high accuracy at expense of findings intelligibility. In this work, a novel ML glass-box model, the Explainable Boosting Machine (EBM), based on Generalized Additive Models plus interactions (GA(2)Ms), was employed to obtain interpretability in classifying PD and SWEDD while still providing optimal performance. Dataset (168 healthy controls, HC; 396 PD; 58 SWEDD) was obtained from PPMI database and consisted of 178 among clinical and imaging features. Six binary EBM classifiers were trained on feature space with (SBR) and without (noSBR) dopaminergic striatal specific binding ratio: HC-PD(SBR), HC-SWEDD(SBR), PD-SWEDD(SBR) and HC-PD(noSBR), HC-SWEDD(noSBR), PD-SWEDD(noSBR). Excellent AUC-ROC (1) was reached in classifying HC from PD and SWEDD, both with and without SBR, and by PD-SWEDD(SBR) (0.986), while PD-SWEDD(noSBR) showed lower AUC-ROC (0.882). Apart from optimal accuracies, EBM algorithm was able to provide global and local explanations, revealing that the presence of pairwise interactions between UPSIT Booklet #1 and Epworth Sleepiness Scale item 3 (ESS3), MDS-UPDRS-III pronation-supination movements right hand (NP3PRSPR) and MDS-UPDRS-III rigidity left upper limb (NP3RIGLU) could provide good performance in predicting PD and SWEDD also without imaging features.