Fig. 7: Construction of the single-cell immune age prediction model based on lifecycle-wide single-cell data.
a, Workflow of the single-cell immune age prediction model construction. b, Dot plot showing the predictive performance of the cell-type-specific immune age prediction models based on our lifecycle-wide single-cell data. The top ten cell types with the highest scores are shown. c, Scatter plot showing the correlation of single-cell immune age (siAge) with chronological age (cAge) in the training set (n = 56 samples). d, Scatter plot showing the correlation of siAge with cAge in the external healthy validation cohort (n = 33 samples). e, Scatter plot showing the correlation of siAge with cAge in the external validation cohort of diseased patients with disturbed immune functions (n = 56 samples). f, Box plot comparing the fit index distribution calculated by the siAge model in the healthy validation cohort with those of the diseased validation cohorts, which include NPC (n = 10 samples), SLE (n = 40 samples) and KD (n = 6 samples) cohorts. Box plots show median, first (lower hinge) and third (upper hinge) quartiles; whiskers show 1.5× the interquartile range. P values were determined by two-sided unpaired Wilcoxon rank-sum test. g, Bar plot showing the top 21 key genes identified by random forest regression. The genes are ranked in descending order of importance with respect to the accuracy of the model. The insert represents a tenfold cross-validation error as a function of the number of input features used to regress against the chronological ages. h, Heatmap showing the row-scaled expression of the top 21 key genes across age in corresponding cell subsets. i, Bar plot showing functional enrichment of the top 21 key genes. P values were determined by hypergeometric test. In c–e, the blue line indicates linear regression; PCC and P values are indicated. The gray shadow covers the 95% confidence interval. In c–f, P < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. KD, Kawasaki diseases; NPC, nasopharyngeal carcinoma; SLE, systemic lupus erythematosus.
