Tensor-based Fusion of Multi-modal Data for Predicting Cancer Risk Levels
Cancer diagnosis and treatment increasingly rely on multi-modal diagnostic technologies that generate high-dimensional datasets. Although these datasets are rich in pathological information, they pose considerable challenges in interpretation, dimensionality reduction, and clinical applicability. Conventional machine learning approaches often fail to extract meaningful cross-modal features, thereby limiting predictive accuracy in patient risk stratification. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an unsupervised machine learning framework that integrates feature extraction, tensor decomposition, and clustering to improve cancer risk prediction. The framework employs tensor decomposition to fuse heterogeneous genomic and clinical data, enabling the extraction of latent, biologically meaningful features that outperform unimodal feature sets. Multiple feature extraction strategies are investigated, and the resulting features are subsequently clustered using a range of clustering algorithms. Comparative evaluations based on internal and external metrics are then used to identify the most effective configurations. The framework is validated on LinkedOmics data comprising 11,158 patients across 32 cancer types. For patient risk stratification, clinically relevant attributes such as tumor purity, pathological stage, and survival outcomes serve as ground-truth indicators. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of tSVD+GMM, which consistently outperforms other configurations across clinical benchmarks.