An Uncertainty-Aware Dynamic Decision Framework for Progressive Multi-Omics Integration in Classification Tasks

Background and Objective: High-throughput multi-omics technologies have proven invaluable for elucidating disease mechanisms and enabling early diagnosis. However, the high cost of multi-omics profiling imposes a significant economic burden, with over reliance on full omics data potentially leading to unnecessary resource consumption. To address these issues, we propose an uncertainty-aware, multi-view dynamic decision framework for omics data classification that aims to achieve high diagnostic accuracy while minimizing testing costs. Methodology: At the single-omics level, we refine the activation functions of neural networks to generate Dirichlet distribution parameters, utilizing subjective logic to quantify both the belief masses and uncertainty mass of classification results. Belief mass reflects the support of a specific omics modality for a disease class, while the uncertainty parameter captures limitations in data quality and model discriminability, providing a more trustworthy basis for decision-making. At the multi omics level, we employ a fusion strategy based on Dempster-Shafer theory to integrate heterogeneous modalities, leveraging their complementarity to boost diagnostic accuracy and robustness. A dynamic decision mechanism is then applied that omics data are incrementally introduced for each patient until either all data sources are utilized or the model confidence exceeds a predefined threshold, potentially before all data sources are utilized. Results and Conclusion: We evaluate our approach on four benchmark multi-omics datasets, ROSMAP, LGG, BRCA, and KIPAN. In three datasets, over 50% of cases achieved accurate classification using a single omics modality, effectively reducing redundant testing. Meanwhile, our method maintains diagnostic performance comparable to full-omics models and preserves essential biological insights.