9 research outputs found
Fair Evaluation of Global Network Aligners
Biological network alignment identifies topologically and functionally
conserved regions between networks of different species. It encompasses two
algorithmic steps: node cost function (NCF), which measures similarities
between nodes in different networks, and alignment strategy (AS), which uses
these similarities to rapidly identify high-scoring alignments. Different
methods use both different NCFs and different ASs. Thus, it is unclear whether
the superiority of a method comes from its NCF, its AS, or both. We already
showed on MI-GRAAL and IsoRankN that combining NCF of one method and AS of
another method can lead to a new superior method. Here, we evaluate MI-GRAAL
against newer GHOST to potentially further improve alignment quality. Also, we
approach several important questions that have not been asked systematically
thus far. First, we ask how much of the node similarity information in NCF
should come from sequence data compared to topology data. Existing methods
determine this more-less arbitrarily, which could affect the resulting
alignment(s). Second, when topology is used in NCF, we ask how large the size
of the neighborhoods of the compared nodes should be. Existing methods assume
that larger neighborhood sizes are better.
We find that MI-GRAAL's NCF is superior to GHOST's NCF, while the performance
of the methods' ASs is data-dependent. Thus, the combination of MI-GRAAL's NCF
and GHOST's AS could be a new superior method for certain data. Also, which
amount of sequence information is used within NCF does not affect alignment
quality, while the inclusion of topological information is crucial. Finally,
larger neighborhood sizes are preferred, but often, it is the second largest
size that is superior, and using this size would decrease computational
complexity.
Together, our results give several general recommendations for a fair
evaluation of network alignment methods.Comment: 19 pages. 10 figures. Presented at the 2014 ISMB Conference, July
13-15, Boston, M
Data-driven network alignment
Biological network alignment (NA) aims to find a node mapping between
species' molecular networks that uncovers similar network regions, thus
allowing for transfer of functional knowledge between the aligned nodes.
However, current NA methods do not end up aligning functionally related nodes.
A likely reason is that they assume it is topologically similar nodes that are
functionally related. However, we show that this assumption does not hold well.
So, a paradigm shift is needed with how the NA problem is approached. We
redefine NA as a data-driven framework, TARA (daTA-dRiven network Alignment),
which attempts to learn the relationship between topological relatedness and
functional relatedness without assuming that topological relatedness
corresponds to topological similarity, like traditional NA methods do. TARA
trains a classifier to predict whether two nodes from different networks are
functionally related based on their network topological patterns. We find that
TARA is able to make accurate predictions. TARA then takes each pair of nodes
that are predicted as related to be part of an alignment. Like traditional NA
methods, TARA uses this alignment for the across-species transfer of functional
knowledge. Clearly, TARA as currently implemented uses topological but not
protein sequence information for this task. We find that TARA outperforms
existing state-of-the-art NA methods that also use topological information,
WAVE and SANA, and even outperforms or complements a state-of-the-art NA method
that uses both topological and sequence information, PrimAlign. Hence, adding
sequence information to TARA, which is our future work, is likely to further
improve its performance
Simultaneous Optimization of Both Node and Edge Conservation in Network Alignment via WAVE
Network alignment can be used to transfer functional knowledge between
conserved regions of different networks. Typically, existing methods use a node
cost function (NCF) to compute similarity between nodes in different networks
and an alignment strategy (AS) to find high-scoring alignments with respect to
the total NCF over all aligned nodes (or node conservation). But, they then
evaluate quality of their alignments via some other measure that is different
than the node conservation measure used to guide the alignment construction
process. Typically, one measures the amount of conserved edges, but only after
alignments are produced. Hence, a recent attempt aimed to directly maximize the
amount of conserved edges while constructing alignments, which improved
alignment accuracy. Here, we aim to directly maximize both node and edge
conservation during alignment construction to further improve alignment
accuracy. For this, we design a novel measure of edge conservation that (unlike
existing measures that treat each conserved edge the same) weighs each
conserved edge so that edges with highly NCF-similar end nodes are favored. As
a result, we introduce a novel AS, Weighted Alignment VotEr (WAVE), which can
optimize any measures of node and edge conservation, and which can be used with
any NCF or combination of multiple NCFs. Using WAVE on top of established
state-of-the-art NCFs leads to superior alignments compared to the existing
methods that optimize only node conservation or only edge conservation or that
treat each conserved edge the same. And while we evaluate WAVE in the
computational biology domain, it is easily applicable in any domain.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure
Additional file 1: of Fair evaluation of global network aligners
Supplementary material containing additional results