Joint learning sample similarity and correlation representation for cancer survival prediction

Background: As a highly aggressive disease, cancer has been becoming the leading death cause around the world. Accurate prediction of the survival expectancy for cancer patients is significant, which can help clinicians make appropriate therapeutic schemes. With the high-throughput sequencing technology becoming more and more cost-effective, integrating multi-type genome-wide data has been a promising method in cancer survival prediction. Based on these genomic data, some data-integration methods for cancer survival prediction have been proposed. However, existing methods fail to simultaneously utilize feature information and structure information of multi-type genome-wide data. Results: We propose a Multi-type Data Joint Learning (MDJL) approach based on multi-type genome-wide data, which comprehensively exploits feature information and structure information. Specifically, MDJL exploits correlation representations between any two data types by cross-correlation calculation for learning discriminant features. Moreover, based on the learned multiple correlation representations, MDJL constructs sample similarity matrices for capturing global and local structures across different data types. With the learned discriminant representation matrix and fused similarity matrix, MDJL constructs graph convolutional network with Cox loss for survival prediction. Conclusions: Experimental results demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms established integrative methods and is effective for cancer survival prediction.