Visualising Associations Between Paired `Omics' Data Sets

Background: 
Each omics platform is now able to generate a large amount of data. Genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, interactomics are compiled at an ever increasing pace and now form a core part of the fundamental systems biology framework. Recently, several integrative approaches have been proposed to extract meaningful information. However, these approaches lack of visualisation outputs to fully unravel the complex associations between different biological entities. 

Results: 
The multivariate statistical approaches 'regularized Canonical Correlation Analysis' and 'sparse Partial Least Squares regression' were recently developed to integrate two types of highly dimensional 'omics' data and to select relevant information. Using the results of these methods, we propose to revisit few graphical outputs to better understand the relationships between two 'omics'data and to better visualise the correlation structure between the different biological entities. These graphical outputs include Correlation Circle plots, Relevance Networks and Clustered Image Maps. 

Conclusions: 
Such graphical outputs are undoubtedly useful to aid the interpretation of these promising integrative analysis tools and will certainly help in addressing fundamental biological questions and understanding systems as a whole. 

The article is published online in the journal BioData Mining and is free to access.