Cited by 903Bioinformatics and Genomic NetworksGene expression and cancer classificationArtificial Intelligence in Healthcare

Using machine learning approaches for multi-omics data analysis: A review

Open access
Reel, Parminder S., Reel, Smarti, Pearson, Ewan, Trucco, Emanuele, Jefferson, Emily·2021·Biotechnology Advances

Abstract

With the development of modern high-throughput omic measurement platforms, it has become essential for biomedical studies to undertake an integrative (combined) approach to fully utilise these data to gain insights into biological systems. Data from various omics sources such as genetics, proteomics, and metabolomics can be integrated to unravel the intricate working of systems biology using machine learning-based predictive algorithms. Machine learning methods offer novel techniques to integrate and analyse the various omics data enabling the discovery of new biomarkers. These biomarkers have the potential to help in accurate disease prediction, patient stratification and delivering of precision medicine. This review paper explores different integrative machine learning methods which have been used to provide an in-depth understanding of biological systems during normal physiological functioning and in the presence of a disease. It provides insight and recommendations for interdisciplinary professionals who envisage employing machine learning skills in multi-omics studies.

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Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

This review surveys machine learning approaches for integrating multi-omics data, organizing methods into concatenation-, model-, and transformation-based strategies for supervised and unsupervised learning. It provides background, application examples, challenges, and a recommendation flowchart for interdisciplinary method selection.

Key findings

  • Multi-omics integration methods are grouped into three main classes: concatenation-based, model-based, and transformation-based, each with distinct advantages and disadvantages for combining omics data.
  • The review reports that most multi-omics studies focus on cancer, especially breast and ovarian cancer, and that integration can improve understanding of disease complexity beyond single-omics analysis.
  • It cites examples including an ADNI study using neuroimaging, biochemical, and genetic biomarkers to discriminate early Alzheimer’s patients from healthy volunteers with 98% accuracy, and notes class imbalance examples such as primary hypertension at 95% prevalence versus endocrine hypertension at 5%.
  • A recommendation flowchart is proposed to help interdisciplinary teams choose an appropriate integration method, but the paper states that no “one-size-fits-all” approach is feasible.

Methods

  • Narrative review of supervised and unsupervised ML strategies for multi-omics integration, explicitly excluding reinforcement, hybrid, multi-view, and self-supervised learning because they have not gained enough momentum in multi-omics analysis.
  • Summarizes integration methods, published multi-omics studies, ML terminology, algorithms, and advantages/disadvantages in tables, and presents a recommendation flowchart.
  • No primary dataset or experimental analysis is reported; the paper synthesizes existing literature and examples.

Limitations

  • The authors state that existing literature does not provide many direct comparisons between methods using the same publicly available datasets, and that empirical investigation guided by ML practitioners is recommended.
  • The review’s scope excludes several emerging ML specializations, including reinforcement, hybrid, multi-view, and self-supervised learning.
  • Evident from the text: this is a narrative review without a systematic search protocol or quantitative synthesis, and the provided version is a journal pre-proof with production artifacts.

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Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/j.biotechadv.2021.107739

Cites

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Statistics

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Claims the paper makes

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  • Findingcitation

    Commonly used machine learning algorithms differ in their attributes.

    “The commonly used ML algorithms have different attributes (Table 4) and therefore it is crucial to choose an appropriate algorithm for the multi-omics analysis.”
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  • Findingown data

    Most multi-omics studies focus on different forms of cancer.

    “It is evident from Table 8 that most of the multi-omics studies focus on different forms of cancer.”
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    Many intra-omics studies have successfully explored integration of gene expression and DNA methylation.

    “Many intra-omics studies have successfully explored the integration of gene expression and DNA methylation.”
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    Many multi-omic reviews concentrate on narrow sub-topics, including study design, workflows, software selection, and overfitting evaluation.

    “Currently, many of the multi-omic reviews are focussed on individual sub-topics.For example, designing studies (Haas et al., 2017;Hasin et al., 2017), setting up workflows (Kohl et al., 2014), choosing software tools (Misra et al., 2019) and evaluating overfitted performance (McCabe et al., 2020).”
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    Patient clinical and omics data, as part of health-related big data, is now more widely accessible.

    “Health-based big data including linked information for patients, such as their clinical data (for example gender, age, pathological and physiological history) and omics data (such as genetics, proteomics and metabolomics) has now become more widely available (Canuel et al., 2015;Singhal et al., 2016).”
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    Findingcitation

    Web of Science publication counts show that machine learning use in medical science has grown faster over the last ten years.

    “Figure 1 shows the number of publications indexed on the Web of Science website (Clarivate Analytics, 2020) with different key topics.This information was collected from the Web of Science by entering a different keyword and searching across all databases 2 .Although the use of ML in medical science can be dated back to 1970s (Davenport and Kalakota, 2019), more rapid growth is evident in the past”
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    Findingcitation

    Publications on multi-omics integration and on multi-omics with machine learning began appearing in the last five years and have become popular in precision and computational medicine.

    “Moreover, publications based on ‗multi-omics integration' and ‗multi-omics and machine learning' have started to emerge in the last 5 years and have gained popularity in precision and computational medicine domain.”
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    A plethora of multi-omic integration methods are available for both supervised and unsupervised learning.

    “Today a plethora of multi-omic integration methods are available for both supervised and unsupervised learning as evident in the current review.”
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    Findingnone given

    Existing literature does not provide many direct comparisons between methods using the same publicly available datasets.

    “Also, unfortunately, the existing literature does not provide many direct comparisons between methods using the same publicly available datasets.”
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    Deep learning has become the leading class of machine learning algorithms.

    “Deep learning has emerged in recent years as the leading class of ML algorithms.”
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    Several machine learning specialisations, including reinforcement, hybrid, multi-view and self-supervised learning, are appearing in general healthcare but have not yet gained sufficient traction in multi-omics analysis.

    “Although various ML specialisations such as reinforcement (Coronato et al., 2020), hybrid (Zhou et al., 2019), multi-view (Zhao et al., 2017) and selfsupervised learning (Chen et al., 2019) are now emerging in generic health-care applications, they have not yet gained enough momentum in multi-omics analysis, hence they remain beyond the scope of this review.”
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    Multi-omics machine learning is still at an early stage, yet it has been explored across many application areas.

    “Although ML analysis of multi-omics is still in its embryonic stage, it has already been explored for a wide range of applications, as reported in recent reviews on brain diseases (Garali et al., 2018;Young et al., 2013), diabetes (Kavakiotis et al., 2017), cancers (Borad and LoRusso, 2017;Chaudhary et al., 2017;Wong et al., 2016) cardiovascular disease (Weng et al., 2017), medical imaging (Ericks”
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    Machine learning has become popular in health sciences because computing power and high-throughput omics data are more available and AI has succeeded in many fields.

    “In recent years, with the increasing availability of affordable computing power and high-throughput omics data and the success of artificial intelligence technology in various fields, the use of ML has become popular in health sciences (Lee and Yoon, 2017;Clifton et al., 2015;Hung, 2019;Barnett-Itzhaki et al., 2020;Kirchebner et al., 2020).”
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    Omics data have recently been integrated in COVID-19 research.

    “Recently, these omics have also been integrated for COVID-19 studies (Barh et al., 2020;Overmyer et al., 2020;Zhou et al., 2020).”
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    Taken together, omics data give a complete view of cell biology and cellular function.

    “Overall, these omics provide a complete picture of cell biology and related cellular function (Cox, 2009).”
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    Deep learning is computationally demanding, needs high-throughput or high-performance hardware, and is not transparent in feature selection.

    “On the other hand, it is very computationally intensive, requiring highthroughput or high-performance hardware, and lacks explainability (transparency) in feature selection (black-box approach), in the sense that it is difficult to extract from the network the features that the network has found as mainly responsible for the task, e.g.classification (LeCun et al., 2015).”
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    Primary hypertension has a prevalence of 95%, whereas endocrine hypertension has a prevalence of only 5%.

    “For example, primary hypertension is the most common form of hypertension with 95% prevalence while endocrine hypertension occurs in only 5% (Rimoldi et al., 2014).”
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    Regularisation, bagging, hyperparameter tuning and cross-validation can help balance the bias-variance trade-off.

    “Similarly, techniques such as regularisation, bagging, hyperparameter tuning and cross-validation can used to balance bias-variance trade-off (Lee, 2010).”
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    Other non-machine-learning challenges affect multi-omics studies, including study design, multi-site sample collection and management, data sharing and governance, visualisation, ethical standards, reproducibility and translation.

    “However, there are few other challenges related to multi-omics studies which are not ML related such as study design (Haas et al., 2017), multi-site sample collection & management (Pinu et al., 2019), multi-site data sharing and governance (Saulnier et al., 2019), visualisation (Mougin et al., 2018), ethical standards (Lévesque et al., 2018), and finally making the research reproducible (Conesa”
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    Interpretationreasoning

    Because every multi-omics dataset is unique, a similar workflow could help choose the most suitable algorithm.

    “Since each multi-omics dataset is unique, using a similar workflow could allow the selection of the best-suited algorithm.”
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    Deep learning is widely used in other areas such as medical imaging and clinical natural language processing, but its use in multi-omics analysis has been more limited.

    “Although deep learning is widely popular in other related domains (such as medical imaging (Erickson et al., 2017) and clinical natural language processing (Wu et al., 2020)), the interest has been more limited for multi-omics analysis (X.Tan et al., 2020).”
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    Most reviews have introduced categorical terminologies to group integration methods by different factors or parameters.

    “Most of these reviews have strived to introduce different categorical terminologies (for example: ‗'early', ‗late' and ‗intermediate' in (Gligorijević and Pržulj, 2015) or ‗bottom-up' and ‗top-down' in (Yu and Zeng, 2018)) which enable them to group the integration methods based on different factors/parameters.”
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    New data integration methods have been introduced in recent years from mathematical, statistical and computational sciences.

    “In recent years, various new data integration methods have been introduced from the modern developments in mathematical, statistical and computational sciences.”
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    Machine learning models can be run on dedicated graphics processing units and cloud computing platforms.

    “In recent years, ML models can be deployed on dedicated graphics processing units (Schmidhuber, 2015) and cloud computing platforms (Armbrust et al., 2010) such as Amazon EC2 (-Amazon EC2,‖ n.d.), Microsoft Azure (-Cloud Computing Services | Microsoft Azure,‖ n.d.) and Google Cloud Platform (-Cloud Computing Services,‖ n.d.).”
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    Interpretationnone given

    All the challenges discussed above directly affect the use of machine learning for multi-omics analysis.

    “All the above challenges directly impact the use of ML for multi-omics analysis.”
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    Transcriptomics and proteomics apply different normalisation and scaling before analysis, which produces different dynamic ranges and distributions.

    “For example, transcriptomics and proteomics use different normalisation and scaling techniques before omics analysis.This leads to different dynamic ranges and data distribution.”
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    Premisecitation

    AI-driven automated machine learning platforms and tools have appeared that can search exhaustively for the best model and parameter tuning, but they are computationally expensive.

    “Recently, various artificial intelligence-driven automated ML platforms and tools (Feurer et al., 2015;Olson et al., 2018;Waring et al., 2020) have also emerged which can be utilised to exhaustively search for best ML model and corresponding parameter tuning, however, they are computationally expensive.”
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    Many machine learning multi-omics publications have appeared in the past five years, and some use decision curve and calibration analytics to assess diagnostic utility.

    “Various ML based multi-omics publications have emerged in the past 5 years (see Figure 1) and some use performance metrics such as decision curve (Vickers and Elkin, 2006) and calibration (Dankers et al., 2019) analytics to evaluate their diagnostic utility.”
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    Many reviews examine the strengths and weaknesses of different machine learning algorithms on single-omics and multi-omics datasets.

    “In the literature, many reviews cover the key strengths and weaknesses of different ML algorithms using single omics (Amancio et al., 2014;López Pineda et al., 2015;Sakr et al., 2017;Uddin et al., 2019) and multi-omics (Ma et al., 2016;Francescatto et al., 2018;J. Xu et al., 2019;Sathyanarayanan et al., 2020) datasets.”
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    Joint NMF is computationally slow and requires large memory allocation.

    “Joint NMF is computationally slow and needs large memory allocation.”
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    iCluster uses principles similar to NMF but allows integration of datasets with negative values.

    “Similarly, Shen (Shen et al., 2009) proposed iCluster framework which used principles similar to NMF but allows integration of datasets having negative values.”
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    Fridley studied genomic effects of gemcitabine using mRNA expression and SNP high-throughput data.

    “Fridley (Fridley et al., 2012) has studied the genomic effects due to the gemcitabine drug using high-throughput data from mRNA expression and SNPs.”
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    iCluster+ can discover patterns and combine omics with binary, categorical and continuous values.

    “The iCluster+ framework can discover patterns and combine a range of omics having binary, categorical and continuous values and was demonstrated by combining genomic data from the colorectal cancer datasets.”
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    Fridley integrated mRNA expression and SNP data into one large input matrix and developed a Bayesian pathway analysis using stochastic search variable selection.

    “They integrated these two datasets into one large input matrix and developed a Bayesian pathway analysis which uses a stochastic search variable selection.”
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    Concatenation-based integration usually needs no preprocessing.

    “Commonly, concatenation-based integration does not require any preprocessing and hence does not have a Stage 2.”
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    JBF used joint factor analysis to evaluate the feature space and converted it into shared and datatype-specific components.

    “joint factor analysis to evaluate the feature space and converted it into shared and datatype-specific components.”
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    When the joint matrix has many features, feature selection methods can be used during concatenation.

    “In scenarios where the number of features in the joint matrix are higher, different feature selection methods described in Section 3 can be employed during concatenation (Sorzano et al., 2014).”
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    Multivariate LASSO models have been studied.

    “Similarly, multivariate LASSO models (Zou, 2006;Nicolai and Bühlmann Peter, 2010;Mankoo et al., 2011) have been investigated.”
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    JIVE was used to investigate gene expression and miRNA data on brain tumour samples.

    “It was used to investigate gene expression and miRNA data on brain tumour samples.”
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    The Bayesian integrative model offers better performance in detecting genomic effects than conventional single-omics analysis.

    “Their proposed that the Bayesian integrative model offers better performance in detecting the genomic effects in comparison to using conventional single-omics analysis.”
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    iClusterBayes includes a binary indicator prior for variable selection and generalises for binary and count data.

    “iClusterBayes includes a binary indicator prior for selection of variable and generalises for binary data and count data.”
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    iClusterBayes overcomes iCluster+ limitations in statistical inference and computational speed.

    “It overcomes the limitations of iCluster+, in terms of statistical inference and computational speed.”
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    Zhu explored Bayesian networks to understand cell regulation in yeast using metabolomics and transcriptomics data.

    “Similarly, Zhu (Zhu et al., 2012) has also explored BN (Bayesian network) to understand cell regulation in yeast using metabolomics and transcriptomics data.”
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    These methods treat all concatenated features equally and can select the most discriminating features for a phenotype.

    “These methods use all the concatenated features equally and can select the most discriminating features for a given phenotype.”
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    LRAcluster was developed to integrate high-dimensional multi-omics data and find a low-dimensional manifold to identify molecular subtypes of cancer.

    “Also, LRAcluster (Wu et al., 2015) was developed to integrate high-dimensional multi-omics data and find low-dimensional manifold to identify molecular subtypes of cancer.”
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    MoCluster showed noticeably higher clustering accuracy and lower computation cost than Cluster and iCluster+ when validated on proteomic and transcriptomic data.

    “MoCluster was validated by integrating proteomic and transcriptomic data and shows a noticeably higher clustering accuracy and lower computation cost in comparison to both Cluster and iCluster+.”
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    JIVE captures joint variation across integrated data types, structural variation of each data type, and residual noise.

    “Another adaptation of NMF was evaluated as JIVE (Joint and Individual Variation Explained) which captures joint variation across integrating data types and structural variation of each data type along with the residual noise (Lock et al., 2013).”
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    The model-based approach allows analysis of improvement in predictive power for individual models and finds the best discriminating features.

    “This approach allows the analysis of the improvement in the predictive power for individual models and also finds the best discriminating features.”
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    iClusterBayes is a fully Bayesian latent variable model.

    “Recently, iClusterBayes was introduced by Mo (Mo et al., 2018), which is a fully Bayesian latent variable model.”
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    MOSAE was developed for pan-cancer analysis and compared with conventional ML methods such as SVM, DT, naïve Bayes, KNN, RF and AdaBoost.

    “Recently, MOSAE (Multi-omics Supervised Autoencoder) (K.Tan et al., 2020) was developed for pan-cancer analysis and compared with conventional ML methods such as SVM, DT, naïve Bayes, KNN, RF and AdaBoost.”
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    Interpretationcitation

    Kernel-based algorithms have superior performance to graph-based approaches but usually need more time for training.

    “Overall, it is evident from the literature that kernel-based algorithms have superior performance to graph-based approaches, but they usually need more time for the training phase.”
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    Concatenation-based integration ideally requires all omics data for all patients.

    “Ideally, requires all omics data for all patients.”
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    ATHENA uses grammatical evolution neural networks with Biofilter and Random Jungle to investigate categorical and quantitative variables and develop prediction models.

    “It uses grammatical evolution neural networks along with Biofilter (Bush et al., 2009) and Random Jungle (Schwarz et al., 2010) to investigate different categorical and quantitative variables and develop prediction models.”
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    Concatenation-based integration does not consider the unique distribution of each omics.

    “Does not consider the unique distribution of each omics.”
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    Lemon-Tree implemented ensemble methods for reconstructing module networks using somatic copy number alterations and gene expression in brain tumour samples.

    “Lemon-Tree (Bonnet et al., 2015) implemented ensemble methods for reconstructing module networks which used somatic copy number alterations and gene expression in brain tumour samples.”
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    Premisecitation

    Meta-SVM integrates multiple omics data and can detect consensus genes associated with diseases across studies such as breast cancer and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

    “Meta-SVM (Meta-analytic SVM) is proposed by Kim (Kim et al., 2017), which integrates multiple omics data and able to detect consensus genes associated with diseases across studies such as breast cancer and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked
    • cites Kim et al., 2017 source

      Not checked in the free run.

  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing).

    Premisecitation

    Denoising autoencoder has been incorporated with L1-penalized logistic regression for identifying ovarian cancer subtypes.

    “Similarly, Denoising autoencoder has been incorporated along with L1-penalized logistic regression for identifying ovarian cancer subtypes (Guo et al., 2020).”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked
    • cites Guo et al., 2020 source

      Not checked in the free run.

  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing).

    Premisecitation

    NEMO uses an inter-patient similarity matrix-based distance metric to evaluate input omic datasets individually.

    “Recently, NEMO (NEighborhood based Multi-Omics clustering) (Rappoport and Shamir, 2019) is introduced which uses an inter-patient similarity matrix-based distance metric for evaluating the input omic datasets individually.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked
    • cites Rappoport and Shamir, 2019 source

      Not checked in the free run.

  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing), S4 (based).

    Premisenone given

    Concatenation-based integration needs proper normalisation before concatenation.

    “Need proper normalisation before concatenation.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim
  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing), S4 (based).

    Premisenone given

    Model-based integration does not increase dimensional complexity.

    “Does not increase dimensional complexity.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim
  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing).

    Premisecitation

    rMKL-LPP was implemented for clustering analysis.

    “Lately, rMKL-LPP (regularised multiple kernel learning for Locality Preserving Projections) (Speicher and Pfeifer, 2015) was implemented for clustering analysis.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked
    • cites Speicher and Pfeifer, 2015

      Not checked in the free run.

  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing).

    Premisecitation

    Most transformation-based supervised learning methods are kernel and graph-based algorithms.

    “Most of them are kernel and graph-based algorithms (Yan et al., 2017).”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked
    • cites Yan et al., 2017 source

      Not checked in the free run.

  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing), S4 (based).

    Premisenone given

    Model-based integration is not effective if omics data is extremely heterogeneous.

    “Not effective if omics data is extremely heterogeneous.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim
  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing).

    Premisecitation

    ATHENA was developed for analysing multi-omics data.

    “In the past years, ATHENA (Analysis Tool for Heritable and Environmental Network Associations) was developed for analysing multi-omics data (Chung and Kang, 2019;Holzinger et al., 2014).”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 2 sources checked
    • cites Chung and Kang, 2019

      Not checked in the free run.

    • cites Holzinger et al., 2014 source

      Not checked in the free run.

  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing), S4 (based). May combine two claims.

    Premisenone given

    Transformation-based graph representation is easy to understand and computationally less intensive.

    “Graph representation easy to understand and computationally less intensive.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim
  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S4 (based).

    Premisenone given

    Model-based integration facilitates understanding of interactions among different omics.

    “Facilitates the understanding of interactions amongst different omics.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim
  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing), S4 (based). The quote only partly states this claim.

    Premisenone given

    Transformation-based kernel methods provide superior performance.

    “Kernel methods provide superior performance.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim
  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing). May combine two claims.

    Premisecitation

    PSDF uses a two-step process and limits integration to only two datatypes.

    “It uses a two-step process and limits the integration to only two datatypes.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked
    • cites Yuan et al., 2011 source

      Not checked in the free run.

  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing), S4 (based).

    Premisenone given

    Model-based integration allows omics data from different sets of patients with a similar phenotype.

    “Omics data can be from a different set of patients with a similar phenotype.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim
  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S2 (checkable), S3 (load-bearing), S4 (based).

    Premisenone given

    Transformation can sometimes be challenging.

    “Transformation can be sometimes challenging.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim
  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing).

    Premisecitation

    HI-DFNForest integrates learned representations to predict cancer subtype classification.

    “Later, these representations are integrated to predict cancer subtype classification.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked
    • cites J.Xu et al., 2019

      Not checked in the free run.

  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing), S4 (based).

    Premisenone given

    Concatenation-based integration is memory and computation-intensive when the concatenated matrix is large.

    “Memory and computation-intensive when the concatenated matrix is large.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim
  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing).

    Premisecitation

    MOLI used type-specific encoding sub-networks to learn features from somatic mutation, CNA and gene expression data independently and then concatenated them for drug response prediction.

    “MOLI (multi-omics late integration) (Sharifi-Noghabi et al., 2019) method used type-specific encoding sub-networks to learn features from somatic mutation, CNA and gene expression data independently and then later concatenated them for predicting the response to a given drug.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked
    • cites Sharifi-Noghabi et al., 2019 source

      Not checked in the free run.

  • May combine two claims.

    Interpretationnone given

    Graph-based approaches can disclose relations between samples while taking less computation time.

    “In contrast, graph-based approaches can disclose the relations between samples while taking less computation time.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim
  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing), S4 (based).

    Premisenone given

    Transformation-based integration allows multi-omics data for the same patient to be used for disease subgroup analysis.

    “Multi-omics data for the same patient can be used for their disease subgroup analysis.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim
  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing). May combine two claims.

    Premisecitation

    NEMO combines omics matrices into one matrix and analyses it using spectral-based clustering.

    “These omics matrices are then combined into one matrix and then analysed using spectral-based clustering.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked
    • cites Rappoport and Shamir, 2019 source

      Not checked in the free run.

  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing).

    Interpretationreasoning

    Many multi-omics studies related to breast and ovarian cancer highlight research thrust by the scientific community in these domains.

    “In particular, the presence of many multi-omics studies related to breast (Chen et al., 2017;Lee et al., 2017;List et al., 2014;Ma et al., 2016;Nam et al., 2009) and ovarian (Anděl et al., 2015;Mankoo et al., 2011;Paik et al., 2017;Zhang et al., 2014) cancer highlights the research thrust by the scientific community in these domains.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 2 sources checked
    • cites Chen et al., 2017 source

      Not checked in the free run.

    • cites Anděl et al., 2015

      Not checked in the free run.

  • May combine two claims.

    Premisecitation

    SNF constructs networks of samples for each data type and fuses them into a joint network representing the complete range of original data.

    “Furthermore, SNF (Similarity Network Fusion) (Wang et al., 2014) constructs networks of samples for respective data type and then effectively fuse them into a joint network which denotes the complete range of original data.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked
    • cites Wang et al., 2014 source

      Not checked in the free run.

  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing), S4 (based).

    Premisenone given

    Model-based integration could lose weak signals.

    “Weak signals could be lost.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim
  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing), S4 (based).

    Premisenone given

    Kernel methods are computationally more intensive than graph methods.

    “Kernel methods are computationally more intensive than graph methods.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim
  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing), S4 (based).

    Premisenone given

    Model-based integration could lead to an overfitted solution.

    “Could lead to an overfitted solution”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim
  • May combine two claims.

    Interpretationnone given

    Recent multi-omics studies highlight superiority of integration methods in understanding disease complexity and uncovering abnormalities from multi-omics data, which is not always possible with individual omics analysis.

    “Overall, the different recent multi-omics studies highlight the superiority of integration methods in understanding the complexity of different diseases and uncovering the underlying abnormalities from the vastly generated multi-omics data, which is not always possible with individual omics analysis.”
    Quote in the paperSubstantial claim
  • May combine two claims.

    Premisecitation

    Metabolomics and proteomics have been integrated using RF for prostate cancer and thyroid functioning.

    “Metabolomics and proteomics have been integrated using RF for analysis of prostate cancer (Fan et al., 2011) and thyroid functioning (Pietzner et al., 2017).”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 2 sources checked
    • cites Fan et al., 2011 source

      Not checked in the free run.

    • cites Pietzner et al., 2017 source

      Not checked in the free run.

  • May combine two claims.

    Premisecitation

    Metabolomics is integrated with mRNA for studying ulcerative colitis and cancer survival.

    “Similarly, metabolomics is integrated with mRNA for studying ulcerative colitis (Bjerrum et al., 2014) and cancer survival (Kim et al., 2014).”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 2 sources checked
    • cites Bjerrum et al., 2014

      Not checked in the free run.

    • cites Kim et al., 2014 source

      Not checked in the free run.

  • May combine two claims.

    Premisecitation

    LASSO methods have been used for integrating gene expression and DNA methylation by Taskesen and Lee for acute myeloid leukaemia and breast cancer respectively.

    “LASSO methods have been used for this particular integration by Taskesen (Taskesen et al., 2015) and Lee (Lee et al., 2017) for acute myeloid leukaemia and breast cancer respectively.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 2 sources checked
    • cites Taskesen et al., 2015 source

      Not checked in the free run.

    • cites Lee et al., 2017

      Not checked in the free run.

  • Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S2 (checkable).

    Interpretationnone given

    A one-size-fits-all approach is not feasible.

    “Clearly, a ‗one-size-fits-all' approach is not feasible.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim
  • May combine two claims.

    Premisecitation

    Multi-omics studies have been successfully conducted in plants and animals.

    “Multi-omics studies have also been successfully conducted in plants (potato (Acharjee et al., 2016(Acharjee et al., , 2011))) and animals (such as canine heart disease (Li et al., 2015)).”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 2 sources checked
    • cites Acharjee et al., 2016 source

      Not checked in the free run.

    • cites Li et al., 2015

      Not checked in the free run.

  • May combine two claims.

    Premisecitation

    mRNA-miRNA integration was investigated using Neural Fuzzy Network for colorectal cancer, SVM for pancreatic cancer, and RF for cardiac tissue ageing and ovarian cancer.

    “Similarly, mRNA -miRNA integration was investigated using Neural Fuzzy Network for colorectal cancer (Vineetha et al., 2013), SVM for pancreatic cancer (Kwon et al., 2015), and RF for cardiac tissue ageing (Dimitrakopoulos et al., 2014) and ovarian cancer (Anděl et al., 2015) respectively.”
    Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 3 sources checked
    • cites Vineetha et al., 2013 source

      Not checked in the free run.

    • cites Kwon et al., 2015 source

      Not checked in the free run.

    • cites Dimitrakopoulos et al., 2014

      Not checked in the free run.

83 of 83

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • With increasingly sophisticated -omics technologies, dimensionality of data increases rapidly, surpassing the number of cases, which remains similar over time (curse of dimensionality).

    “With increasingly sophisticated -omics technologies, the dimensionality of data increases rapidly, thereby surpassing the number of cases, which remains similar over time. This phenomenon is described as the “curse of dimensionality”44.”

    From Orchestrating explainable artificial intelligence for multimodal and longitudinal data in medical imaging (2024) · cites this paper as [44]

    Section 3.3, “More features than data (p >> n)” (page not supplied), describes the curse of dimensionality as multi-omics datasets having far fewer samples than features. It does not say that feature counts rise rapidly as technologies improve or that the number of cases remains similar over time. (LLM, conf=0.85)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

  • Concatenation is described as both needing and not needing preprocessing

    Minor

    Section 4.1 says concatenation-based integration commonly requires no preprocessing, but Table 6 says it needs proper normalisation before concatenation.

  • Model-based workflow assigns individual models to different stages

    Minor

    The workflow says individual omics models are developed in Stage 2 and integrated in Stage 3, but the later description places the individual omics models in Stage 3.

  • mRNA is classified as a microRNA despite being defined as messenger RNA

    Minor

    The paper expands mRNA as messenger RNA, but later places it within "microRNAs (mRNA and miRNA)."

3 of 3

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. Clarivate Analytics, 2020, Web of science [v.5.35] - web of science core collection basic search [WWW Document], Web Sci.
  2. Tipping, 2001, Sparse bayesian learning and the relevance vector machine, J. Mach. Learn. Res., 1, 211
  3. Wang, 2020, MORONET: multi-omics integration via graph convolutional networks for biomedical data classification, bioRxiv

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Reel, P. S., Reel, S., Pearson, E., Trucco, E., & Jefferson, E.
Affiliations
University of Dundee (GB)
Corresponding author
Jefferson, Emily
Venue
Biotechnology Advances
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2021-07
Volume
49
Pages
107739
ISSN
0734-9750 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3139601120
Cited by
903
References
357
Citations by year
2026: 186 · 2025: 239 · 2024: 227 · 2023: 148 · 2022: 89 · 2021: 14
FWCI
13.04
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Biotechnology Advances (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Discovery Research Portal (University of Dundee) (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
Funders
  • Horizon 2020
  • University of Dundee (16/136/102)
  • Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (633983)
  • National Institute for Health Research
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Gene expression and cancer classification
  • Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
Keywords
multi-omics integration, machine learning, biomarker discovery, disease prediction, patient stratification, precision medicine, systems biology, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, predictive algorithms
MeSH terms
Machine Learning, Algorithms, Humans, Proteomics, Systems Biology, Metabolomics

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Claims read by deepseek-v4.1-flash under definition version 3 (extract-v3) on 2026-10-09.

Classified by jev-1.13-20260917 (gold-guideline-v0.2) on 2026-10-09.

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