The increasing availability of multiple types of genomic profiles measured from the same cancer patients has provided numerous opportunities for investigating genomic mechanisms underlying cancer. In particular, association studies of gene expression traits with respect to multi-layered genomic features are highly useful for uncovering the underlying mechanism. Conventional correlation-based association tests are limited because they are prone to revealing indirect associations. Moreover, integration of multiple types of genomic features raises another challenge.

In this study, we propose a new framework for association studies called integrative regression network that identifies genomic associations on multiple high-dimensional genomic profiles by taking into account the associations between as well as within profiles. We employed high-dimensional regression techniques to first identify the associations between different genomic profiles. Based on the resulting regression coefficients, a regression network was constructed within each profile. For example, two methylation features having similar regression coefficients with respect to a number of gene expression traits are likely to be involved in the same biological process and therefore we define an edge between two methylation features in the regression network. To extract more reliable associations, multiple sparse structured regression techniques were applied and the resulting multiple networks were merged as the integrative regression network using a similarity network fusion technique.

Experiments were carried out using four different sparse structured regression methods on five cancer types from TCGA. The advantages and disadvantages of each regression method were also explored. We find there was large inconsistency in the results from different regression methods, which supports the need to extract the proposed integrative regression network from multiple complimentary regression techniques. Fusing multiple regression networks by using similarity measurements led to the identification of significant gene pairs and a resulting network with better topological properties.

We developed and validated the integrative regression network scheme on multi-layered genomic profiles from TCGA. Our method facilitates identification of the strong signals as well as weaker signals by fusing information from different regression techniques. It could be extended to integrate results obtained from different cancer types as well.