SynOmics: integrating multi-omics data through feature interaction networks
The integration of multi-omics data is essential for achieving a comprehensive understanding of molecular systems and enhancing the performance of predictive models in biomedical research. However, many existing models have limited capacity to capture cross-omics feature interactions, which hinders the depth of integration. In this study, we introduce SynOmics, a graph convolutional network framework designed to improve multi-omics integration by constructing omics networks in the feature space and modeling both within- and cross-omics dependencies. By incorporating both omics-specific networks and cross-omics bipartite networks, SynOmics enables simultaneous learning of intra-omics and inter-omics relationships. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on early or late integration strategies, SynOmics adopts a parallel learning strategy to process feature-level interactions at each layer of the model. Experimental results demonstrate that SynOmics consistently outperforms state-of-the-art multi-omics integration methods across a range of biomedical classification tasks, highlighting its potential for biomarker discovery and clinical applications.
Authors
- Wei Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3605-9373)
- Muhtasim Noor Alif
Institutions
- University of Central Florida (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Briefings in Bioinformatics
- Published
- 2025-11-01
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbaf595
- Primary Topic
- Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Science Foundation
- National Human Genome Research Institute
- National Cancer Institute