  Alzheimer's disease (AD), as a progressive brain disease, affects cognition,
memory, and behavior. Similarly, limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43
encephalopathy (LATE) is a recently defined common neurodegenerative disease
that mimics the clinical symptoms of AD. At present, the risk factors
implicated in LATE and those distinguishing LATE from AD are largely unknown.
We leveraged an integrated feature selection-based algorithmic approach, to
identify important factors differentiating subjects with LATE and/or AD from
Control on significantly imbalanced data. We analyzed two datasets ROSMAP and
NACC and discovered that alcohol consumption was a top lifestyle and
environmental factor linked with LATE and AD and their associations were
differential. In particular, we identified a specific subpopulation consisting
of APOE e4 carriers. We found that, for this subpopulation, light-to-moderate
alcohol intake was a protective factor against both AD and LATE, but its
protective role against AD appeared stronger than LATE. The codes for our
algorithms are available at https://github.com/xinxingwu-uk/PFV.
