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Similarity network fusion for aggregating data types on a genomic scale

Nature Methods volume 11, pages 333–337 (2014)Cite this article

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Abstract

Recent technologies have made it cost-effective to collect diverse types of genome-wide data. Computational methods are needed to combine these data to create a comprehensive view of a given disease or a biological process. Similarity network fusion (SNF) solves this problem by constructing networks of samples (e.g., patients) for each available data type and then efficiently fusing these into one network that represents the full spectrum of underlying data. For example, to create a comprehensive view of a disease given a cohort of patients, SNF computes and fuses patient similarity networks obtained from each of their data types separately, taking advantage of the complementarity in the data. We used SNF to combine mRNA expression, DNA methylation and microRNA (miRNA) expression data for five cancer data sets. SNF substantially outperforms single data type analysis and established integrative approaches when identifying cancer subtypes and is effective for predicting survival.

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Figure 1: Illustrative example of SNF steps.
Figure 2: Patient similarities for each of the data types independently compared to SNF fused similarity.
Figure 3: Comparison of the SNF approach to iCluster and concatenation.

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Acknowledgements

This study used data generated by TCGA and METABRIC; we thank TCGA, the Cancer Research UK and the British Columbia Cancer Agency Branch for sharing these invaluable data with the scientific community. We thank N. Jabado, M. Wilson and J. Rommens for feedback on the manuscript, and B. Sousa for help with the figures. This study was partially funded by the Government of Canada through Genome Canada and the Ontario Genomics Institute (OGI-068) to M.B.; A.G. is funded by the SickKids Research Institute. Z.T. was supported by NSF IIS-1360568.

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Author notes

  1. Bo Wang & Benjamin Haibe-Kains

    Present address: Present addresses: Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA (B.W.). and Ontario Cancer Institute, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre—University Health Network, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (B.H.-K.).,

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Genetics and Genome Biology, SickKids Research Institute, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Bo Wang, Aziz M Mezlini, Feyyaz Demir, Michael Brudno & Anna Goldenberg

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Aziz M Mezlini, Feyyaz Demir, Marc Fiume, Michael Brudno & Anna Goldenberg

  3. Department of Cognitive Science, University of California San Diego, San Diego, California, USA

    Zhuowen Tu

  4. Institut de Recherches Cliniques de Montréal, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Quebec, Canada

    Benjamin Haibe-Kains

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Contributions

B.W. and A.G. conceived of and designed the approach. B.W. performed the data analysis, implemented the method in Matlab and performed all computational experiments. A.M.M. performed data preparation. F.D. wrote the R code that is distributed with the paper. M.F. assisted with network visualization and analysis. Z.T. helped with method design and theoretical framework. B.H.-K. assisted in preparation and analysis of the METABRIC data. B.W., M.B. and A.G. wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anna Goldenberg.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–20, Supplementary Table 1, Supplementary Notes 1 –3 and Supplementary Results (PDF 6804 kb)

Supplementary Software

Similarity Network Fusion for aggregating multiple data types (ZIP 415 kb)

Supplementary Data

TCGA cancer datasets after pre-processing (ZIP 81276 kb)

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Wang, B., Mezlini, A., Demir, F. et al. Similarity network fusion for aggregating data types on a genomic scale. Nat Methods 11, 333–337 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2810

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