Abstract
Motivation The increasing amount of data produced by omics technologies has significantly improved the understanding of how biological information is transferred across different omics layers and to which extent it is involved in the manifestation of a given phenotype. Besides data-driven analysis strategies, interactive visualization tools have been developed to make the analysis in the multi-omics field more transparent. However, most state-of-the-art tools do not reconstruct the impact of a given omics layer on the final integration result. In general, the amount of omics data analyses strategies and the fields of applications lack a clearer classification of the different approaches.
Results We developed a classification for omics data focusing on different aspects of multi-omics data sets, such as data type and experimental design. Based on this classification we developed the Omics Trend-comparing Interactive Data Explorer (OmicsTIDE), an interactive visualization tool developed to address the limitations of current visualization approaches in the multi-omics field. The tool consists of an automated part that clusters omics data to determine trends and an interactive visualization. The trends are visualized as profile plots and are connected by a Sankey diagram that allows an interactive pairwise trend comparison to discover concordant and discordant trends. Moreover, large-scale omics data sets are broken down into small subsets of concordant and discordant regulatory trends within few analysis steps. We demonstrate the interactive analysis using OmicsTIDE with two case studies focusing on different types of experimental designs.
Availability OmicsTIDE is a web tool and available via http://tuevis.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/
Contact kay.nieselt{at}uni-tuebingen.de
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
