Uncertainty-aware dynamic integration for multi-omics classification of tumors

Abstract

Purpose: Omics data are crucial for medical diagnosis as it contains intrinsic biomedical information. Multi-omics integrated analysis has become a new direction for scientists to explore life mechanisms. Nevertheless, the quality of complex omics data often varies greatly due to different samples or even different omics types, it is challenging to dynamically capture the uncertainty for different kinds of omics data.

Methods: This paper proposes a uncertainty-aware dynamic integration framework for multi-omics classification. The framework consists of three modules: deep embedding, confidence prediction, and downstream tasks. The deep embedding module extract key information from multi-omics data to obtain a low-dimensional feature representation which is used to train downstream tasks. Combined with the deep embedding module, the confidence prediction module is used to dynamically capture the uncertainty of the data. We introduce "confidNet" to assign a confidence value for each type of omics data, which is used for dynamic integration between multi-omics.

Results: Compared with other integration methods, the proposed method can contain more crucial biomedical information in the obtained low-dimensional representation. Our framework realizes reliable integration among multiple omics, and it can still achieve high accuracy on small sample data sets. We have verified the effectiveness of the model in a large number of experiments.

Conclusion: Our framework can be widely applied to high-dimensional omics data and has great potential to facilitate medical decision-making and biological analysis.

Keywords: Deep learning; Multi-omics integration; Tumor classification; Uncertainty estimation.