Bayesian network prior: network analysis of biological data using external knowledge

Authors

Senol Isci, Bogazici University
Haluk Dogan, Istanbul Bilgi UniversityFollow
Cengizhan Ozturk, Bogazici University
Hasan H. Otu, Istanbul Bilgi UniversityFollow

ORCID IDs

Hasan H. Otu

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2014

Citation

Vol. 30 no. 6 2014, pages 860–867

Comments

Copyright The Author 2013.

Open access

doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btt643

Abstract

Motivation: Reverse engineering GI networks from experimental data is a challenging task due to the complex nature of the networks and the noise inherent in the data. One way to overcome these hurdles would be incorporating the vast amounts of external biological knowledge when building interaction networks. We propose a framework where GI networks are learned from experimental data using Bayesian networks (BNs) and the incorporation of external knowledge is also done via a BN that we call Bayesian Network Prior (BNP). BNP depicts the relation between various evidence types that contribute to the event ‘gene interaction’ and is used to calculate the probability of a candidate graph (G) in the structure learning process.

Results: Our simulation results on synthetic, simulated and real biological data show that the proposed approach can identify the underlying interaction network with high accuracy even when the prior information is distorted and outperforms existing methods.