Ensemble learning algorithms for classification of mtDNA into haplogroups

Classification of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) into their respective haplogroups allows the addressing of various anthropologic and forensic issues. Unique to mtDNA is its abundance and non-recombining uni-parental mode of inheritance; consequently, mutations are the only changes observed in the genetic material. These individual mutations are classified into their cladistic haplogroups allowing the tracing of different genetic branch points in human (and other organisms) evolution. Due to the large number of samples, it becomes necessary to automate the classification process. Using 5-fold cross-validation, we investigated two classification techniques on the consented database of 21 141 samples published by the Genographic project. The support vector machines (SVM) algorithm achieved a macro-accuracy of 88.06% and micro-accuracy of 96.59%, while the random forest (RF) algorithm achieved a macro-accuracy of 87.35% and micro-accuracy of 96.19%. In addition to being faster and more memory-economic in making predictions, SVM and RF are better than or comparable to the nearest-neighbor method employed by the Genographic project in terms of prediction accuracy.