Detection of statistically significant network changes in complex biological networks

1 MotivationBiological networks contribute effectively to unveil the complex structure of molecular interactions and to discover driver genes especially in cancer context. It can happen that due to gene mutations, as for example when cancer progresses, the gene expression network undergoes some amount of localised re-wiring. The ability to detect statistical relevant changes in the interaction patterns induced by the progression of the disease can lead to discovery of novel relevant signatures.\n\n2 ResultsSeveral procedures have been recently proposed to detect sub-network differences in pairwise labeled weighted networks. In this paper, we propose an improvement over the state-of-the-art based on the Generalized Hamming Distance adopted for evaluating the topological difference between two networks and estimating its statistical significance. The proposed procedure exploits a more effective model selection criteria to generate p-values for statistical significance and is more efficient in terms of computational time and prediction accuracy than literature methods. Moreover, the structure of the proposed algorithm allows for a faster parallelized implementation. In the case of dense random geometric networks the proposed approach is 10-15x faster and achieves 5-10% higher AUC, Precision/Recall, and Kappa value than the state-of-the-art. We also report the application of the method to dissect the difference between the regulatory networks of IDH-mutant versus IDH-wild-type glioma cancer. In such a case our method is able to identify some recently reported master regulators as well as novel important candidates.\n\n3 AvailabilityThe scripts implementing the proposed algorithms are available in R at https://sites.google.com/site/raghvendramallmlresearcher/codes.\n\n4 Contactrmall@qf.org.qa