The Human Metabolome and Machine Learning Improves Predictions of the Post-Mortem Interval
An accurate prediction of the time since death, known as the post-mortem interval (PMI), remains a critical research question in forensic and police investigations. Current methods, such as rectal temperature or vitreous potassium levels, only provide reliable PMI estimations up to 48-72 hours. In this study, we utilized metabolomic data from femoral whole blood samples of 4,876 individuals with known PMIs ranging from 1 to 67 days. We developed a neural network model that predicted PMI with a mean/median absolute error of 1.45/1.03 days in unseen test cases, outperforming six other machine learning architectures. To further highlight the biological signal, we performed pseudo time-series clustering of metabolic features used by the model, revealing 158 decreasing, 254 increasing, and 398 features with more complex patterns over the pseudo-time scale. Our findings also indicate that metabolomic data from approximately 256 individuals is sufficient to train a machine learning model for PMI prediction, making this approach widely applicable for researchers and forensic institutes worldwide.