Concepts and applications for influenza antigenic cartography.

Influenza antigenic cartography projects influenza antigens into a two or three dimensional map based on immunological datasets, such as hemagglutination inhibition and microneutralization assays. A robust antigenic cartography can facilitate influenza vaccine strain selection since the antigenic map can simplify data interpretation through intuitive antigenic map. However, antigenic cartography construction is not trivial due to the challenging features embedded in the immunological data, such as data incompleteness, high noises, and low reactors. To overcome these challenges, we developed a computational method, temporal Matrix Completion-Multidimensional Scaling (MC-MDS), by adapting the low rank MC concept from the movie recommendation system in Netflix and the MDS method from geographic cartography construction. The application on H3N2 and 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza A viruses demonstrates that temporal MC-MDS is effective and efficient in constructing influenza antigenic cartography. The web sever is available at http://sysbio.cvm.msstate.edu/AntigenMap.