Decoupled contrastive multi-view clustering with adaptive false negative elimination for cancer subtyping

Cancer's heterogeneity necessitates precise subtype identification for effective diagnosis and treatment, which can be achieved by integrating multi-omics data to reveal distinct molecular characteristics and enable personalized therapies. Recently, significant efforts have been made through contrastive clustering methods to efficiently identify cancer subtypes. However, existing approaches remain limited in effectively capturing inter- and intra-view relationships in multi-omics data. Additionally, most cancer subtyping methods often rely on random sampling to construct negative pairs, which may inadvertently engender false negatives. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end self-supervised learning model named Decoupled Contrastive Multi-view Clustering with adaptive false negative elimination (DCMC). Specifically, DCMC adopts a multi-view clustering architecture that facilitates intra- and inter-view contrastive learning across distinct embedding spaces, allowing view-specific information to be preserved while maintaining cross-view consistency. We further introduce an adaptive false negative elimination framework to progressively screen potential false negatives. Finally, pseudo-label rectification is applied to enhance the quality of the learned representations and further refine the clustering process. DCMC is evaluated on 10 commonly used cancer datasets against 19 state-of-the-art methods, with experimental results validating its superior performance. In the Liver Hepatocellular Carcinoma case study, differential expression analysis is performed to identify potential biomarkers, while the cancer subtypes identified by DCMC are validated for their responses to specific therapeutic drugs. The datasets and source code for DCMC are available online at https://github.com/LinMengX/DCMC.