Statistical data integration: Challenges and opportunities

The authors Morris and Baladandayuthapani should be congratulated on this comprehensive and compelling review of statistical contributions in bioinformatics. In the last section, the authors discuss a burgeoning new area of research they term ‘integromics’, which involves integrating and jointly analyzing multiple types of ‘omics’ data. While we prefer the term ‘data integration’, we agree that this is an exciting new area of statistical and bioinformatics research. In this piece, we aim to complement Morris and Baladandayuthapani by further discussing data integration from a methodological and practical standpoint. We will specifically outline some of the major challenges of data integration, some recent successes, and highlight open areas for future research.