Background
The occurrence and development of cancer involves multi-level information of the system, which is highly heterogeneous. Therefore, how to effectively integrate multi-omics information to achieve accurate identification of cancer subtypes is the key to achieve precision medicine of cancer.
Results
In this paper, we propose a multi-kernel network fusion based on multi-omics data to identify cancer subtypes, named MMKNF. For each kind of omics data, multi-kernel functions are used to calculate the sample similarity, which can better integrate the multi-view similarity between samples. For multi-omics data, similarity network fusion (SNF) can be used to more effectively fuse the similarity of samples under different molecular features, so as to achieve more accurate clustering of samples, and then find more significant cancer subtypes. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MMKNF obtains more significant results than the eleven methods on six datasets in ten cancer datasets. In addition, we investigated the clinical significance of the obtained colon cancer subtypes and provided new insights into treating patients with different subtypes.
Conclusion
We provide a new method for the identification of cancer subtypes, named MMKNF, which also confirms the importance of cancer subtype identification in cancer treatment.