Predicting High Blood Pressure Using DNA Methylome-Based Machine Learning Models

DNA methylation modification plays a vital role in the pathophysiology of high blood pressure (BP). Herein, we applied three machine learning (ML) algorithms including deep learning (DL), support vector machine, and random forest for detecting high BP using DNA methylome data. Peripheral blood samples of 50 elderly individuals were collected three times at three visits for DNA methylome profiling. Participants who had a history of hypertension and/or current high BP measure were considered to have high BP. The whole dataset was randomly divided to conduct a nested five-group cross-validation for prediction performance. Data in each outer training set were independently normalized using a min–max scaler, reduced dimensionality using principal component analysis, then fed into three predictive algorithms. Of the three ML algorithms, DL achieved the best performance (AUPRC = 0.65, AUROC = 0.73, accuracy = 0.69, and F1-score = 0.73). To confirm the reliability of using DNA methylome as a biomarker for high BP, we constructed mixed-effects models and found that 61,694 methylation sites located in 15,523 intragenic regions and 16,754 intergenic regions were significantly associated with BP measures. Our proposed models pioneered the methodology of applying ML and DNA methylome data for early detection of high BP in clinical practices.