Discovering Recurrent Copy Number Aberrations in Complex Patterns via Non-Negative Sparse Singular Value Decomposition

Recurrent copy number aberrations (RCNAs) in multiple cancer samples are strongly associated with tumorigenesis, and RCNA discovery is helpful to cancer research and treatment. Despite the emergence of numerous RCNA discovering methods, most of them are unable to detect RCNAs in complex patterns that are influenced by complicating factors including aberration in partial samples, co-existing of gains and losses and normal-like tumor samples. Here, we propose a novel computational method, called non-negative sparse singular value decomposition (NN-SSVD), to address the RCNA discovering problem in complex patterns. In NN-SSVD, the measurement of RCNA is based on the aberration frequency in a part of samples rather than all samples, which can circumvent the complexity of different RCNA patterns. We evaluate NN-SSVD on synthetic dataset by comparison on detection scores and Receiver Operating Characteristics curves, and the results show that NN-SSVD outperforms existing methods in RCNA discovery and demonstrate more robustness to RCNA complicating factors. Applying our approach on a breast cancer dataset, we successfully identify a number of genomic regions that are strongly correlated with previous studies, which harbor a bunch of known breast cancer associated genes.