An inferential framework for biological network hypothesis tests

摘要

BackgroundNetworks are ubiquitous in modern cell biology and physiology. A large literature exists for inferring/proposing biological pathwaysetworks using statistical or machine learning algorithms. Despite these advances a formal testing procedure for analyzing network-level observations is in need of further development. Comparing the behaviour of a pharmacologically altered pathway to its canonical form is an example of a salient one-sample comparison. Locating which pathways differentiate disease from no-disease phenotype may be recast as a two-sample network inference problem.