Identifying Disease Associated Multi-Omics Network With Mixed Graphical Models Based on Markov Random Field Model

In this article, we proposed a new method named fused mixed graphical model (FMGM), which can infer network structures associated with dichotomous phenotypes. FMGM is based on a pairwise Markov random field model, and statistical analyses including the proposed method were conducted to find biological markers and underlying network structures of the atopic dermatitis (AD) from multiomics data of 6-month-old infants. The performance of FMGM was evaluated with simulations by using synthetic datasets of power-law networks, showing that FMGM had superior performance for identifying the differences of the networks compared to the separate inference with the previous method, causalMGM (F1-scores 0.550 vs. 0.730). Furthermore, FMGM was applied to identify multiomics profiles associated with AD, and significance association was found for the correlation between carotenoid biosynthesis and RNA degradation, suggesting the importance of metabolism related to oxidative stress and microbial RNA balance. R codes can be accessed as an R package “fusedMGM,” and an example data set and a script for analyses can be found at http://figshare.com/articles/dataset/FMGM_synthetic_data_example_zip/20509113.