B-scaling: A Novel Nonparametric Data Fusion Method

TL;DR

B-scaling is a new nonparametric data fusion technique that effectively integrates multi-source measurements of the same latent variable, capturing nonlinear relationships and demonstrated with epigenomic data.

Contribution

The paper introduces B-scaling, a novel nonparametric method for data fusion that models complex nonlinear relationships among multiple data sources measuring the same latent variable.

Findings

B-scaling accurately captures the common information across sources.

The method shows strong performance in numerical and empirical studies.

Applied to epigenomic data, it reveals meaningful biological insights.

Abstract

Very often for the same scientific question, there may exist different techniques or experiments that measure the same numerical quantity. Historically, various methods have been developed to exploit the information within each type of data independently. However, statistical data fusion methods that could effectively integrate multi-source data under a unified framework are lacking. In this paper, we propose a novel data fusion method, called B-scaling, for integrating multi-source data. Consider $K$ measurements that are generated from different sources but measure the same latent variable through some linear or nonlinear ways. We seek to find a representation of the latent variable, named B-mean, which captures the common information contained in the $K$ measurements while takes into account the nonlinear mappings between them and the latent variable. We also establish the asymptotic property of the B-mean and apply the proposed method to integrate multiple histone modifications and DNA methylation levels for characterizing epigenomic landscape. Both numerical and empirical studies show that B-scaling is a powerful data fusion method with broad applications.