A robust kernel machine regression towards biomarker selection in multi-omics datasets of osteoporosis for drug discovery
This addresses the challenge of robustly analyzing multi-omics data for complex diseases like osteoporosis, offering a method that could aid in drug discovery, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing kernel regression approaches.
The authors tackled the problem of biomarker selection in multi-omics datasets for osteoporosis, proposing a robust kernel machine regression method that identified significant biomarkers (e.g., DKK1, MTND5) with strong statistical evidence (p-value = 0.00001) and linked them to four drugs for potential repurposing.
Many statistical machine approaches could ultimately highlight novel features of the etiology of complex diseases by analyzing multi-omics data. However, they are sensitive to some deviations in distribution when the observed samples are potentially contaminated with adversarial corrupted outliers (e.g., a fictional data distribution). Likewise, statistical advances lag in supporting comprehensive data-driven analyses of complex multi-omics data integration. We propose a novel non-linear M-estimator-based approach, "robust kernel machine regression (RobKMR)," to improve the robustness of statistical machine regression and the diversity of fictional data to examine the higher-order composite effect of multi-omics datasets. We address a robust kernel-centered Gram matrix to estimate the model parameters accurately. We also propose a robust score test to assess the marginal and joint Hadamard product of features from multi-omics data. We apply our proposed approach to a multi-omics dataset of osteoporosis (OP) from Caucasian females. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively identifies the inter-related risk factors of OP. With solid evidence (p-value = 0.00001), biological validations, network-based analysis, causal inference, and drug repurposing, the selected three triplets ((DKK1, SMTN, DRGX), (MTND5, FASTKD2, CSMD3), (MTND5, COG3, CSMD3)) are significant biomarkers and directly relate to BMD. Overall, the top three selected genes (DKK1, MTND5, FASTKD2) and one gene (SIDT1 at p-value= 0.001) significantly bond with four drugs- Tacrolimus, Ibandronate, Alendronate, and Bazedoxifene out of 30 candidates for drug repurposing in OP. Further, the proposed approach can be applied to any disease model where multi-omics datasets are available.