Min-redundancy and max-relevance multi-view feature selection for predicting ovarian cancer survival using multi-omics data

BACKGROUND: Large-scale collaborative precision medicine initiatives (e.g., The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA)) are yielding rich multi-omics data. Integrative analyses of the resulting multi-omics data, such as somatic mutation, copy number alteration (CNA), DNA methylation, miRNA, gene expression, and protein expression, offer tantalizing possibilities for realizing the promise and potential of precision medicine in cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment by substantially improving our understanding of underlying mechanisms as well as the discovery of novel biomarkers for different types of cancers. However, such analyses present a number of challenges, including heterogeneity, and high-dimensionality of omics data. METHODS: We propose a novel framework for multi-omics data integration using multi-view feature selection. We introduce a novel multi-view feature selection algorithm, MRMR-mv, an adaptation of the well-known Min-Redundancy and Maximum-Relevance (MRMR) single-view feature selection algorithm to the multi-view setting. RESULTS: We report results of experiments using an ovarian cancer multi-omics dataset derived from the TCGA database on the task of predicting ovarian cancer survival. Our results suggest that multi-view models outperform both view-specific models (i.e., models trained and tested using a single type of omics data) and models based on two baseline data fusion methods. CONCLUSIONS: Our results demonstrate the potential of multi-view feature selection in integrative analyses and predictive modeling from multi-omics data. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12920-018-0388-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.