SFFS-SW: A feature selection algorithm exploring the small-world properties of GNs

Abstract

In recent years, several methods for gene networks (GNs) inference from expression data have been developed. Also, models of data integration (as protein-protein and protein-DNA) are nowadays broadly used to face the problem of few amount of expression data. Moreover, it is well known that biological networks conserve some topological properties. The small-world topology is a common arrangement in nature found both in biological and non-biological phenomena. However, in general this information is not used by GNs inference methods. In this work we proposed a new GNs inference algorithm that combines topological features and expression data. The algorithm outperforms the approach that uses only expression data both in accuracy and measures of recovered network. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.