PartIES: a disease subtyping framework with Partition-level Integration using diffusion-Enhanced Similarities from...

Integrating multi-omics data helps identify disease subtypes. Many similarity-based methods were developed for disease subtyping using multi-omics data, with many of them focusing on extracting common clustering structures across multiple types of omics data, but not preserving data-type-specific clustering structures. Moreover, clustering performance of similarity-based methods is affected when similarity measures are noisy. Here we proposed PartIES, a Partition-level Integration using diffusion-Enhanced Similarities to perform disease subtyping using multi-omics data. PartIES uses diffusion to reduce noises in individual similarity/kernel matrices from individual omics data types first, and then extract partition information from diffusion-enhanced similarity matrices and integrate the partition-level similarity through a weighted average iteratively. Simulation studies showed that (1) the diffusion step enhances clustering accuracy, and (2) PartIES outperforms competing methods, particularly when omics data types provide different clustering structures. Using mRNA, long noncoding RNAs, microRNAs expression data, DNA methylation data, and somatic mutation data from The Cancer Genome Atlas project, PartIES identified subtypes in bladder urothelial carcinoma, liver hepatocellular carcinoma, and thyroid carcinoma that are most significantly associated with patient survival across all methods. Further investigations suggested that among subtype-associated genes, many of those that are highly interacting with other genes are known important cancer genes. The identified cancer subtypes also have different activity levels for some known cancer-related pathways. The R code can be accessed at https://github.com/yuqimiao/PartIES.git.