A hybrid network-based method for the detection of disease-related genes

作者:Cui, Ying; Cai, Meng*; Dai, Yang; Stanley, H. Eugene
来源:Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications , 2018, 492: 389-394.
DOI:10.1016/j.physa.2017.10.026

摘要

Detecting disease-related genes is crucial in disease diagnosis and drug design. The accepted view is that neighbors of a disease-causing gene in a molecular network tend to cause the same or similar diseases, and network-based methods have been recently developed to identify novel hereditary disease-genes in available biomedical networks. Despite the steady increase in the discovery of disease-associated genes, there is still a large fraction of disease genes that remains under the tip of the iceberg. In this paper we exploit the topological properties of the protein protein interaction (PPI) network to detect disease-related genes. We compute, analyze, and compare the topological properties of disease genes with non-disease genes in PPI networks. We also design an improved random forest classifier based on these network topological features, and a cross-validation test confirms that our method performs better than previous similar studies.