An integrative imputation method based on multi-omics datasets

BACKGROUND: Integrative analysis of multi-omics data is becoming increasingly important to unravel functional mechanisms of complex diseases. However, the currently available multi-omics datasets inevitably suffer from missing values due to technical limitations and various constrains in experiments. These missing values severely hinder integrative analysis of multi-omics data. Current imputation methods mainly focus on using single omics data while ignoring biological interconnections and information imbedded in multi-omics data sets. RESULTS: In this study, a novel multi-omics imputation method was proposed to integrate multiple correlated omics datasets for improving the imputation accuracy. Our method was designed to: 1) combine the estimates of missing value from individual omics data itself as well as from other omics, and 2) simultaneously impute multiple missing omics datasets by an iterative algorithm. We compared our method with five imputation methods using single omics data at different noise levels, sample sizes and data missing rates. The results demonstrated the advantage and efficiency of our method, consistently in terms of the imputation error and the recovery of mRNA-miRNA network structure. CONCLUSIONS: We concluded that our proposed imputation method can utilize more biological information to minimize the imputation error and thus can improve the performance of downstream analysis such as genetic regulatory network construction. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12859-016-1122-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.