A Comparative Analysis of Biological Data Integration Systems Famous for Data Exploitation and Knowledge Discovery

: Integrating heterogeneous biological databases for unveiling the new intra-molecular and inter-molecular attributes, behaviors, and relationships in the human cellular system has always been a focused research area of computational biology. In this context, a lot of biological data integration systems have been deployed in the last couple of decades. One of the prime and common objectives of all these systems is to better facilitate the end-users for exploring, exploiting, and analyzing the integrated biological data for knowledge extraction. With the advent of especially highthroughput data generation technologies, biological data is growing and dispersing continuously, exponentially, heterogeneously, and geographically. Due to this, biological data integration systems are too facing data integration and data organization-related current and future challenges. The objective of this review is to quantitatively evaluate and compare some of the recent warehouse-based multi-omics data integration systems to check their compliance with the current and future data integration needs. For this, we identified some of the major data integration design characteristics that should be in the multi-omics data integration model to comprehensively address the current and future data integration challenges. Based on these design characteristics and the evaluation criteria, we evaluated some of the recent data warehouse systems and showed categorical and comparative analysis results. Results show that most of the systems exhibit no or partial compliance with the required data integration design characteristics. So, these systems need design improvements to adequately address the current and future data integration challenges while keeping their service level commitments in place.

Methods for biological data integration: perspectives and challenges

Rapid technological advances have led to the production of different types of biological data and enabled construction of complex networks with various types of interactions between diverse biological entities. Standard network data analysis methods were shown to be limited in dealing with such heterogeneous networked data and consequently, new methods for integrative data analyses have been proposed. The integrative methods can collectively mine multiple types of biological data and produce more holistic, systems-level biological insights. We survey recent methods for collective mining ( integration ) of various types of networked biological data. We compare different state-of-the-art methods for data integration and highlight their advantages and disadvantages in addressing important biological problems. We identify the important computational challenges of these methods and provide a general guideline for which methods are suited for specific biological problems, or specific data types. Moreover, we propose that recent non-negative matrix factorization-based approaches may become the integration methodology of choice, as they are well suited and accurate in dealing with heterogeneous data and have many opportunities for further development.