Pattern-centric transformation of omics data grounded on discriminative gene associations aids predictive tasks in TCGA while ensuring interpretability

The increasing prevalence of omics data sources is pushing the study of regulatory mechanisms underlying complex diseases such as cancer. However, the vast quantities of molecular features produced and the inherent interplay between them lead to a level of complexity that hampers both descriptive and predictive tasks, requiring custom-built algorithms that can extract relevant information from these sources of data. We propose a transformation that moves data centered on molecules (e.g., transcripts and proteins) to a new data space focused on putative regulatory modules given by statistically relevant co-expression patterns. To this end, the proposed transformation extracts patterns from the data through biclustering and uses them to create new variables with guarantees of interpretability and discriminative power. The transformation is shown to achieve dimensionality reductions of up to 99% and increase predictive performance of various classifiers across multiple omics layers. Results suggest that omics data transformations from gene-centric to pattern-centric data supports both prediction tasks and human interpretation, notably contributing to precision medicine applications.