Hi team!
Thank you for developing this great methodology! I’m interested in using HAIIA for untargeted metabolomics data. The unique aspect of this data is that it provides signal intensity for each metabolite, but the values are not absolute. This means we can compare the values of the same metabolite across samples, but we cannot compare different metabolites within the same sample. In other words, a higher value for metabolite A compared to metabolite B does not necessarily mean there is more A than B.
Since the first step of HAIIA uses Spearman’s rank correlation to create within-dataset clusters (Section 2 of the paper), I believe HAIIA can be applied to untargeted metabolomics data. However, I would like to confirm my understanding.