Comparative Analysis of Multi-Omics Integration Using Graph Neural Networks for Cancer Classification

作者：Fadi Alharbi, Aleksandar Vakanski, Boyu Zhang, M. Elbashir, Mohanad Mohammed · 发表于：IEEE Access · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1109/access.2025.3540769 · 被引用次数：30 · 研究领域：Medicine、Computer Science

Recent studies on integrating multiple omics data highlighted the potential to advance our understanding of the cancer disease process. Computational models based on graph neural networks and attention-based architectures have demonstrated promising results for cancer classification due to their ability to model complex relationships among biological entities. However, challenges related to addressing the high dimensionality and complexity in integrating multi-omics data, as well as in constructing graph structures that effectively capture the interactions between nodes, remain active areas of research. This study evaluates graph neural network architectures for multi-omics (MO) data integration based on graph-convolutional networks (GCN), graph-attention networks (GAT), and graph-transformer networks (GTN). Differential gene expression and LASSO (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator) regression are employed for reducing the omics data dimensionality and feature selection; hence, the developed models are referred to as LASSO-MOGCN, LASSO-MOGAT, and LASSO-MOGTN. Graph structures constructed using sample correlation matrices and protein-protein interaction networks are investigated. Experimental validation is performed with a dataset of 8,464 samples from 31 cancer types and normal tissue, comprising messenger-RNA, micro-RNA, and DNA methylation data. The results show that the models integrating multi-omics data outperformed the models trained on single omics data, w...