Application of Aligned-UMAP to longitudinal biomedical studies

Longitudinal multi-dimensional biological datasets are ubiquitous and highly abundant. These datasets are essential to understanding disease progression, identifying subtypes, and drug discovery. Discovering meaningful patterns or disease pathophysiologies in these datasets is challenging due to their high dimensionality, making it difficult to visualize hidden patterns. Several methods have been developed for dimensionality reduction, but they are limited to cross-sectional datasets. Recently proposed Aligned-UMAP, an extension of the UMAP algorithm, can visualize high-dimensional longitudinal datasets. In this work, we applied Aligned-UMAP on a broad spectrum of clinical, imaging, proteomics, and single-cell datasets. Aligned-UMAP reveals time-dependent hidden patterns when color-coded with the metadata. We found that the algorithm parameters also play a crucial role and must be tuned carefully to utilize the algorithm’s potential fully. Altogether, based on its ease of use and our evaluation of its performance on different modalities, we anticipate that Aligned-UMAP will be a valuable tool for the biomedical community. We also believe our benchmarking study becomes more important as more and more high-dimensional longitudinal data in biomedical research becomes available. Highlights - explored the utility of Aligned-UMAP in longitudinal biomedical datasets - offer insights on optimal uses for the technique - provide recommendations for best practices In Brief High-dimensional longitudinal data is prevalent yet understudied in biological literature. High-dimensional data analysis starts with projecting the data to low dimensions to visualize and understand the underlying data structure. Though few methods are available for visualizing high dimensional longitudinal data, they are not studied extensively in real-world biological datasets. A recently developed nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique, Aligned-UMAP, analyzes sequential data. Here, we give an overview of applications of Aligned-UMAP on various biomedical datasets. We further provide recommendations for best practices and offer insights on optimal uses for the technique.