MOTIVATION: Despite the success of recent machine learning algorithms' applications to survival analysis, their black-box nature hinders interpretability, which is arguably the most important aspect. Similarly, multi-omics data integration for survival analysis is often constrained by the underlying relationships and correlations that are rarely well understood. The goal of this work is to alleviate the interpretability problem in machine learning approaches for survival analysis and also demonstrate how multi-omics data integration improves survival analysis and pathway enrichment. We use meta-learning, a machine-learning algorithm that is trained on a variety of related datasets and allows quick adaptations to new tasks, to perform survival analysis and pathway enrichment on pan-cancer datasets. In recent machine learning research, meta-learning has been effectively used for knowledge transfer among multiple related datasets. RESULTS: We use meta-learning with Cox hazard loss to show that the integration of TCGA pan-cancer data increases the performance of survival analysis. We also apply advanced model interpretability method called DeepLIFT (Deep Learning Important FeaTures) to show different sets of enriched pathways for multi-omics and transcriptomics data. Our results show that multi-omics cancer survival analysis enhances performance compared with using transcriptomics or clinical data alone. Additionally, we show a correlation between variable importance assignment from DeepLIFT and gene coenrichment, suggesting that genes with higher and similar contribution scores are more likely to be enriched together in the same enrichment sets. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: https://github.com/berkuva/TCGA-omics-integration.

MOTIVATION: Genomic region sets summarize functional genomics data and define locations of interest in the genome such as regulatory regions or transcription factor binding sites. The number of publicly available region sets has increased dramatically, leading to challenges in data analysis. RESULTS: We propose a new method to represent genomic region sets as vectors, or embeddings, using an adapted word2vec approach. We compared our approach to two simpler methods based on interval unions or term frequency-inverse document frequency and evaluated the methods in three ways: First, by classifying the cell line, antibody or tissue type of the region set; second, by assessing whether similarity among embeddings can reflect simulated random perturbations of genomic regions; and third, by testing robustness of the proposed representations to different signal thresholds for calling peaks. Our word2vec-based region set embeddings reduce dimensionality from more than a hundred thousand to 100 without significant loss in classification performance. The vector representation could identify cell line, antibody and tissue type with over 90% accuracy. We also found that the vectors could quantitatively summarize simulated random perturbations to region sets and are more robust to subsampling the data derived from different peak calling thresholds. Our evaluations demonstrate that the vectors retain useful biological information in relatively lower-dimensional spaces. We propose that vector representation of region sets is a promising approach for efficient analysis of genomic region data. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: https://github.com/databio/regionset-embedding. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.