BDPM: A Machine Learning-Based Feature Extractor for Parkinson's Disease Classification via Gut Microbiota Analysis
High clinical misdiagnosis rates persist in Parkinson’s disease (PD), and existing deep learning models leveraging gut microbiome data predominantly rely on single classifiers, neglecting ecological interdependencies among microbial taxa and longitudinal dynamics, while suffering from limited feature interpretability. To address these limitations, we propose RFRE—a biologically informed feature selection framework integrating random forests with recursive feature elimination, explicitly incorporating microbial ecological priors to enhance biological interpretability. Furthermore, we design a spatiotemporal-aware hybrid classifier that jointly models cross-sectional compositional differences and longitudinal temporal evolution of microbial abundances. Evaluated on a cohort of 39 PD patient–healthy spouse pairs, our approach achieves significantly improved classification accuracy and robustly identifies discriminative microbial taxa. This work establishes a novel paradigm for early, interpretable, microbiome-based PD diagnosis.