Fusing Sequence Motifs and Pan-Genomic Features: Antimicrobial Resistance Prediction using an Explainable Lightweight 1D CNN - XGBoost Ensemble
Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) is a rapidly escalating global health crisis. While genomic sequencing enables rapid prediction of resistance phenotypes, current computational methods have limitations. Standard machine learning models treat the genome as an unordered collection of features, ignoring the sequential context of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs). State-of-the-art sequence models like Transformers are often too data-hungry and computationally expensive for the moderately-sized datasets that are typical in this domain. To address these challenges, we propose AMR-EnsembleNet, an ensemble framework that synergistically combines sequence-based and feature-based learning. We developed a lightweight, custom 1D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to efficiently learn predictive sequence motifs from high-dimensional SNP data. This sequence-aware model was ensembled with an XGBoost model, a powerful gradient boosting system adept at capturing complex, non-local feature interactions. We trained and evaluated our framework on a benchmark dataset of 809 E. coli strains, predicting resistance across four antibiotics with varying class imbalance. Our 1D CNN-XGBoost ensemble consistently achieved top-tier performance across all the antibiotics, reaching a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.926 for Ciprofloxacin (CIP) and the highest Macro F1-score of 0.691 for the challenging Gentamicin (GEN) AMR prediction. We also show that our model consistently focuses on SNPs within well-known AMR genes like fusA and parC, confirming it learns the correct genetic signals for resistance. Our work demonstrates that fusing a sequence-aware 1D CNN with a feature-based XGBoost model creates a powerful ensemble, overcoming the limitations of using either an order-agnostic or a standalone sequence model. CCS Concepts* Applied computing [->] Bioinformatics; * Computing methodologies [->] Machine learning; Neural networks; Ensemble methods.