Information Fusion in Biological Network Inference

摘要

Background: Biological networks are used to represent interactions involving genes, DNA,RNA and proteins that are able to manipulate many cellular processes.Objective: The aim of this study is to evaluate whether prior knowledge can improve the quality ofbiological networks, in particular protein-protein interaction networks and gene regulatory networks.Method: Gene Ontology (GO) as well as three different types of semantic similarity measures wereused to assess the interaction between biological networks so as to build the corresponding filterednetworks. Both the original and the filtered networks were statistically compared against a referencenetwork.Results and Conclusion: The results confirm the effectiveness of the GO-based measure HRSS as itimproves the quality of the original network by removing many false interactions while maintaining thetrue interactions. In general, the inclusion of external sources of biological information to improve thequality of inferred knowledge (networks or any other model) is a fundamental step before the fusion offiltered -statistically validated- intermediate results.