NeTOIF: A Network-based Approach for Time-Series Omics Data Imputation and Forecasting

Motivation High-throughput studies of biological systems are rapidly generating a wealth of ‘omics’-scale data. Many of these studies are time-series collecting proteomics and genomics data capturing dynamic observations. While time-series omics data are essential to unravel the mechanisms of various diseases, they often include missing (or incomplete) values resulting in data shortage. Data missing and shortage are especially problematic for downstream applications such as omics data integration and computational analyses that need complete and sufficient data representations. Data imputation and forecasting methods have been widely used to mitigate these issues. However, existing imputation and forecasting techniques typically address static omics data representing a single time point and perform forecasting on data with complete values. As a result, these techniques lack the ability to capture the time-ordered nature of data and cannot handle omics data containing missing values at multiple time points. Results We propose a network-based method for time-series omics data imputation and forecasting (NeTOIF) that handle omics data containing missing values at multiple time points. NeTOIF takes advantage of topological relationships (e.g., protein-protein and gene-gene interactions) among omics data samples and incorporates a graph convolutional network to first infer the missing values at different time points. Then, we combine these inferred values with the original omics data to perform time-series imputation and forecasting using a long short-term memory network. Evaluating NeTOIF with a proteomic and a genomic dataset demonstrated a distinct advantage of NeTOIF over existing data imputation and forecasting methods. The average mean square error of NeTOIF improved 11.3% for imputation and 6.4% for forcasting compared to the baseline methods. Contact [email protected]