Aplicação de programação genética gramatical multiobjetiva no estudo do efeito de múltiplas infecções e ambiente no desenvolvimento de atopia e fenótipos de asma

Abstract

In the last decades cases of asthma and other allergic diseases have increased greatly throughout the world, being nowadays a major public health problem. The causes of this increased prevalence are unknown, however the most accepted hypothesis is that it comes from the reduction of childhood infections as a consequence of the recent improvement in hygiene conditions. This reduction of infections can lead to anomalous development of the immune system, thus increasing the chance of developing allergies, including asthma. Asthma and other allergies are complex pathologies caused by genetical and environmental factors, so the use of computational tools such as genetic programming can contribute to the understanding of these diseases. We applied the Multiobjective Grammatical Genetic Programming (MGGP) technique to data obtained from a cohort of 1445 children to generate models which may represent how the relationships between infections and environment may explain the development of allergies and asthma. To assess the presence of asthma, a questionnaire was used and allergy measurements were performed on IgE antibodies against common allergens and skin reactivity test. The results obtained show that the models generated by MGGP show a performance in accuracy that is competitive with those obtained by the algorithm C4.5 and multiple logistic regression for the different outcomes. The results obtained by MGGP are easy to interpret, and capable of finding complex relationship relevant to the understanding of these complex pathologies, therefore MGGP is a powerful tool to help understand these conditions.