BackgroundSince the advent of microarray technology, numerous methods have been devised to infer gene regulatory relationships from gene expression data. Many approaches that infer entire regulatory networks. This produces results that are rich in information and yet so complex that they are often of limited usefulness for researchers. One alternative unit of regulatory interactions is a linear path between genes. Linear paths are more comprehensible than networks and still contain important information. Such paths can be extracted from inferred regulatory networks or inferred directly. Since criteria for inferring networks generally differs from criteria for inferring paths, indirect and direct inference of paths may achieve different results.
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