CrossAttOmics: multiomics data integration with cross-attention

Advances in high throughput technologies enabled large access to various types of omics. Each omics provides a partial view of the underlying biological process. Integrating multiple omics layers would help have a more accurate diagnosis. However, the complexity of omics data requires approaches that can capture complex relationships. One way to accomplish this is by exploiting the known regulatory links between the different omics, which could help in constructing a better multimodal representation.

In this article, we propose CrossAttOmics, a new deep-learning architecture based on the cross-attention mechanism for multiomics integration. Each modality is projected in a lower dimensional space with its specific encoder. Interactions between modalities with known regulatory links are computed in the feature representation space with cross-attention. The results of different experiments carried out in this article show that our model can accurately predict the types of cancer by exploiting the interactions between multiple modalities. CrossAttOmics outperforms other methods when there are few paired training examples. Our approach can be combined with attribution methods like LRP to identify which interactions are the most important.

The code is available at https://github.com/Sanofi-Public/CrossAttOmics and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15065928. TCGA data can be downloaded from the Genomic Data Commons Data Portal. CCLE data can be downloaded from the depmap portal.