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Adam A. Margolin

Publications and source records attributed to Adam A. Margolin.

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Multivariate dependence and genetic networks inference

A critical task in systems biology is the identification of genes that interact to control cellular processes by transcriptional activation of a set of target genes. Many methods have been developed to use statistical correlations in high-throughput datasets to infer such interactions. However, cellular pathways are highly cooperative, often requiring the joint effect of many molecules, and few methods have been proposed to explicitly identify such higher-order interactions, partially due to the fact that the notion of multivariate statistical dependency itself remains imprecisely defined. We define the concept of dependence among multiple variables using maximum entropy techniques and introduce computational tests for their identification. Synthetic network results reveal that this procedure uncovers dependencies even in undersampled regimes, when the joint probability distribution cannot be reliably estimated. Analysis of microarray data from human B cells reveals that third-order statistics, but not second-order ones, uncover relationships between genes that interact in a pathway to cooperatively regulate a common set of targets.

q-bio.QM

ARACNE: An Algorithm for the Reconstruction of Gene Regulatory Networks in a Mammalian Cellular Context

Background: Elucidating gene regulatory networks is crucial for understanding normal cell physiology and complex pathologic phenotypes. Existing computational methods for the genome-wide ``reverse engineering'' of such networks have been successful only for lower eukaryotes with simple genomes. Here we present ARACNE, a novel algorithm, using microarray expression profiles, specifically designed to scale up to the complexity of regulatory networks in mammalian cells, yet general enough to address a wider range of network deconvolution problems. This method uses an information theoretic approach to eliminate the majority of indirect interactions inferred by co-expression methods. Results: We prove that ARACNE reconstructs the network exactly (asymptotically) if the effect of loops in the network topology is negligible, and we show that the algorithm works well in practice, even in the presence of numerous loops and complex topologies. We assess ARACNE's ability to reconstruct transcriptional regulatory networks using both a realistic synthetic dataset and a microarray dataset from human B cells. On synthetic datasets ARACNE achieves very low error rates and outperforms established methods, such as Relevance Networks and Bayesian Networks. Application to the deconvolution of genetic networks in human B cells demonstrates ARACNE's ability to infer validated transcriptional targets of the c MYC proto-oncogene. We also study the effects of mis estimation of mutual information on network reconstruction, and show that algorithms based on mutual information ranking are more resilient to estimation errors.

q-bio.MN