1 research outputs found
Discriminating different classes of biological networks by analyzing the graphs spectra distribution
The brain's structural and functional systems, protein-protein interaction,
and gene networks are examples of biological systems that share some features
of complex networks, such as highly connected nodes, modularity, and
small-world topology. Recent studies indicate that some pathologies present
topological network alterations relative to norms seen in the general
population. Therefore, methods to discriminate the processes that generate the
different classes of networks (e.g., normal and disease) might be crucial for
the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of the disease. It is known that
several topological properties of a network (graph) can be described by the
distribution of the spectrum of its adjacency matrix. Moreover, large networks
generated by the same random process have the same spectrum distribution,
allowing us to use it as a "fingerprint". Based on this relationship, we
introduce and propose the entropy of a graph spectrum to measure the
"uncertainty" of a random graph and the Kullback-Leibler and Jensen-Shannon
divergences between graph spectra to compare networks. We also introduce
general methods for model selection and network model parameter estimation, as
well as a statistical procedure to test the nullity of divergence between two
classes of complex networks. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of the
proposed methods by applying them on (1) protein-protein interaction networks
of different species and (2) on networks derived from children diagnosed with
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and typically developing
children. We conclude that scale-free networks best describe all the
protein-protein interactions. Also, we show that our proposed measures
succeeded in the identification of topological changes in the network while
other commonly used measures (number of edges, clustering coefficient, average
path length) failed