Metrical Consistency NMF for Predicting Gene-Phenotype Associations.

Discovering gene-phenotype associations is significant to understand the disease mechanisms. Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has been widely used in computational biology for its good performance and interpretability. In this paper, we proposed a novel metrical consistency NMF (MCNMF) method for candidate gene prioritization. The MCNMF method assume that phenotype similarities, calculated from various independent ways, should be consistent in case that the associations between genes and phenotypes are completely known. Experiment results show that our method can recover the gene-phenotype associations effectively and outperform the comparative methods.