Multi-View Clustering of Microbiome Samples by Robust Similarity Network Fusion and Spectral Clustering

Microbiome datasets are often comprised of different representations or views which provide complementary information, such as genes, functions, and taxonomic assignments. Integration of multi-view information for clustering microbiome samples could create a comprehensive view of a given microbiome study. Similarity network fusion (SNF) can efficiently integrate similarities built from each view of data into a unique network that represents the full spectrum of the underlying data. Based on this method, we develop a Robust Similarity Network Fusion (RSNF) approach which combines the strength of random forest and the advantage of SNF at data aggregation. The experimental results indicate the strength of the proposed strategy. The method substantially improves the clustering performance significantly comparing to several state-of-the-art methods in several datasets.