MITRE: predicting host status from microbiota time-series data

Longitudinal studies are crucial for discovering casual relationships between the microbiome and human disease. We present Microbiome Interpretable Temporal Rule Engine (MITRE), the first machine learning method specifically designed for predicting host status from microbiome time-series data. Our method maintains interpretability by learning predictive rules over automatically inferred time-periods and phylogenetically related microbes. We validate MITRE’s performance on semi-synthetic data, and five real datasets measuring microbiome composition over time in infant and adult cohorts. Our results demonstrate that MITRE performs on par or outperforms “black box” machine learning approaches, providing a powerful new tool enabling discovery of biologically interpretable relationships between microbiome and human host.