Bayesian tensor factorization-drive breast cancer subtyping by integrating multi-omics data

Abstract

Breast cancer is a highly heterogeneous disease. Subtyping the disease and identifying the genomic features driving these subtypes are critical for precision oncology for breast cancer. This study focuses on developing a new computational approach for breast cancer subtyping. We proposed to use Bayesian tensor factorization (BTF) to integrate multi-omics data of breast cancer, which include expression profiles of RNA-sequencing, copy number variation, and DNA methylation measured on 762 breast cancer patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas. We applied a consensus clustering approach to identify breast cancer subtypes using the factorized latent features by BTF. Subtype-specific survival patterns of the breast cancer patients were evaluated using Kaplan-Meier (KM) estimators. The proposed approach was compared with other state-of-the-art approaches for cancer subtyping. The BTF-subtyping analysis identified 17 optimized latent components, which were used to reveal six major breast cancer subtypes. Out of all different approaches, only the proposed approach showed distinct survival patterns (p < 0.05). Statistical tests also showed that the identified clusters have statistically significant distributions. Our results showed that the proposed approach is a promising strategy to efficiently use publicly available multi-omics data to identify breast cancer subtypes.