Discovering and deciphering relationships across disparate data modalities
Abstract
Understanding the relationships between different properties of data, such as whether a genome or connectome has information about disease status, is increasingly important. While existing approaches can test whether two properties are related, they may require unfeasibly large sample sizes and often are not interpretable. Our approach, 'Multiscale Graph Correlation' (MGC), is a dependence test that juxtaposes disparate data science techniques, including k-nearest neighbors, kernel methods, and multiscale analysis. Other methods may require double or triple the number of samples to achieve the same statistical power as MGC in a benchmark suite including high-dimensional and nonlinear relationships, with dimensionality ranging from 1 to 1000. Moreover, MGC uniquely characterizes the latent geometry underlying the relationship, while maintaining computational efficiency. In real data, including brain imaging and cancer genetics, MGC detects the presence of a dependency and provides guidance for the next experiments to conduct.
Data availability
To facilitate reproducibility, we make all datasets available from: https://github.com/neurodata/MGC-paper/tree/master/Data/Preprocessed
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Child Mind Institute Endeavor Scientist Program
- Joshua T Vogelstein
National Science Foundation
- Joshua T Vogelstein
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- Joshua T Vogelstein
Office of Naval Research
- Joshua T Vogelstein
Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Joshua T Vogelstein
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Dane Taylor, University of Buffalo, United States
Version history
- Received: September 3, 2018
- Accepted: January 14, 2019
- Accepted Manuscript published: January 15, 2019 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: February 22, 2019 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2019, Vogelstein et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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