A multi-omics data simulator for complex disease studies and its application to evaluate multi-omics data analysis methods for disease classification

Abstract

We have developed OmicsSIMLA, which simulates multi-omics data (i.e., genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics data) with disease status. OmicsSIMLA simulates multiple types of omics data while the relationships between different types of omics data and the relationships between the omics data and the disease are modeled. As the development of integrative methods for analyzing multi-omics data has attracted substantial interest from researchers, OmicsSIMLA will be useful to simulate benchmark datasets for comparisons of these methods. Furthermore, as more and more disease studies