SVM-based spectral matching for metabolite identification

Mass spectrometry-based metabolomics is getting mature and playing an ever important role in the systematic understanding of biological process in conjunction with other members of “-omics” family. However, the identification of metabolites in untargeted metabolomics profiling remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a support vector machine (SVM)-based spectral matching algorithm to combine multiple similarity measures for accurate identification of metabolites. We compared the performance of this approach with several existing spectral matching algorithms on a spectral library we constructed. The results demonstrate that our proposed method is very promising in identifying metabolites in the face of data heterogeneity caused by different experimental parameters and platforms.