Human microbiome aging clocks based on deep learning and tandem of permutation feature importance and accumulated local effects

The human gut microbiome is a complex ecosystem that both affects and is affected by its host status. Previous analyses of gut microflora revealed associations between specific microbes and host health and disease status, genotype and diet. Here, we developed a method of predicting the biological age of the host based on the microbiological profiles of gut microbiota using a curated dataset of 1,165 healthy individuals (1,663 microbiome samples). Our predictive model, a human microbiome clock, has an architecture of a deep neural network and achieves the accuracy of 3.94 years mean absolute error in cross-validation. The performance of the deep microbiome clock was also evaluated on several additional populations.