MOFNet: a deep learning framework for multi-omics data fusion in cancer subtype classification.

BACKGROUND

cancer exhibits high molecular and clinical heterogeneity, making accurate subtyping essential for personalized treatment. Traditional single-omics approaches often fail to capture this complexity. Multi-omics integration offers a more holistic understanding, but many existing methods either lack interpretability or fail to model cross-omics correlations effectively.

METHODS

we developed MOFNet, a novel supervised deep learning framework for multi-omics integration, incorporating a similarity graph pooling (SGO) module and a view correlation discovery network (VCDN). MOFNet processes omics data-including mRNA expression, DNA methylation, and miRNA expression-via omics-specific graph learning and cross-omics label space fusion. Three cancer types-breast cancer (BRCA), low-grade glioma (LGG), and stomach adenocarcinoma (STAD)-were analyzed using datasets from the cancer genome atlas (TCGA). Statistical evaluation was performed using accuracy, weighted F1 score, and macro F1 score across stratified training/testing splits.

RESULTS

MOFNet achieved superior performance across all datasets. For BRCA, it obtained an accuracy of 85.17%, F1_weighted of 85.36%, and macro F1 of 80.93%, outperforming all baseline models by up to 18.25%. In LGG and STAD, MOFNet also showed robust gains, with maximum improvements of 23.72% and 21.56%, respectively. Omics ablation studies demonstrated enhanced performance with multi-omics integration. Functional enrichment analysis revealed that MOFNet-identified key features were involved in biologically relevant pathways such as cell cycle regulation, synaptic signaling, and ion transport.

CONCLUSIONS

MOFNet enables scalable and interpretable multi-omics data fusion for cancer subtype classification, significantly improving predictive accuracy while retaining only 25% of input features. The integration of SGO and VCDN modules offers both biological interpretability and computational efficiency. These results suggest MOFNet's promising application in precision oncology and biomarker discovery.