SpaceBF: spatial coexpression analysis using Bayesian fused approaches in spatial omics datasets

Advances in spatial omics enable measurement of genes (spatial transcriptomics) and peptides, lipids, or N-glycans (mass spectrometry imaging) across thousands of locations within a tissue. While detecting spatially variable molecules is a well-studied problem, robust methods for identifying spatially varying co-expression between molecule pairs remain limited. We introduce SpaceBF, a Bayesian fused modeling framework that estimates co-expression at both local (location-specific) and global (tissue-wide) levels. SpaceBF enforces spatial smoothness via a fused horseshoe prior on the edges of a predefined spatial adjacency graph, allowing large, edge-specific differences to escape shrinkage while preserving overall structure. In extensive simulations, SpaceBF achieves higher specificity and power than commonly used methods that leverage geospatial metrics, including bivariate Moran's I and Lee's L. We also benchmark the proposed prior against standard alternatives, such as intrinsic conditional autoregressive and Matérn priors. Applied to spatial transcriptomics and proteomics datasets, SpaceBF reveals cancer-relevant molecular interactions and patterns of cell-cell communication (e.g., ligand-receptor signaling), demonstrating its utility for principled, uncertainty-aware co-expression analysis of spatial omics data.