Figure 4

Some genes were highly predictive for diagnosing MDD, suggesting the biological processes underlying the etiology of major depression. Logistic regression and SVMs both identified genes with significant ability to predict MDD. (a) Maximum predictive power was achieved in logistic regression with 14 transcripts and in SVMs with 10 transcripts, with eight in common. These eight genes are hypothesized to have importance in explaining the biological processes underlying MDD. (b) Enrichr was used to find biological processes enriched in the eight common variables between logistic regression and SVMs. Four processes, as defined by the Gene Ontology (GO) database, were found to be significantly enriched (GO:0015929, GO:0004143, GO:0003951, and GO:0070567). The dotted line indicates the significance cutoff (adjusted p-value of 0.05). Together, these results suggest that multiple converging pathways may have independent roles in contributing to the depressive phenotype, and that MDD may have independent causal factors. MDD, major depressive disorder; SVM, support vector machine.