Regularized adversarial learning for normalization of multi-batch untargeted metabolomics data

Abstract

Motivation: Untargeted metabolomics by mass spectrometry is the method of choice for unbiased analysis of molecules in complex samples of biological, clinical or environmental relevance. The exceptional versatility and sensitivity of modern high-resolution instruments allows profiling of thousands of known and unknown molecules in parallel. Inter-batch differences constitute a common and unresolved problem in untargeted metabolomics, and hinder the analysis of multi-batch studies or the intercomparison of experiments.

Results: We present a new method, Regularized Adversarial Learning Preserving Similarity (RALPS), for the normalization of multi-batch untargeted metabolomics data. RALPS builds on deep adversarial learning with a three-term loss function that mitigates batch effects while preserving biological identity, spectral properties and coefficients of variation. Using two large metabolomics datasets, we showcase the superior performance of RALPS as compared with six state-of-the-art methods for batch correction. Further, we demonstrate that RALPS scales well, is robust, deals with missing values and can handle different experimental designs.

Availability and implementation: https://github.com/zamboni-lab/RALPS.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.