Fusing heterogeneous data sets
This work addresses data integration challenges in systems biology, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing approaches for handling heterogeneity.
The paper tackles the problem of fusing heterogeneous biological datasets, such as different omics data types and measurement scales, by developing statistical methods that are evaluated through simulations and real data analysis.
In systems biology, it is common to measure biochemical entities at different levels of the same biological system. One of the central problems for the data fusion of such data sets is the heterogeneity of the data. This thesis discusses two types of heterogeneity. The first one is the type of data, such as metabolomics, proteomics and RNAseq data in genomics. These different omics data reflect the properties of the studied biological system from different perspectives. The second one is the type of scale, which indicates the measurements obtained at different scales, such as binary, ordinal, interval and ratio-scaled variables. In this thesis, we developed several statistical methods capable to fuse data sets of these two types of heterogeneity. The advantages of the proposed methods in comparison with other approaches are assessed using comprehensive simulations as well as the analysis of real biological data sets.