How threshold behaviour affects the use of subgraphs for network comparison

Abstract

Motivation: A wealth of protein–protein interaction (PPI) data has recently become available. These data are organized as PPI networks and an efficient and biologically meaningful method to compare such PPI networks is needed. As a first step, we would like to compare observed networks to established network models, under the aspect of small subgraph counts, as these are conjectured to relate to functional modules in the PPI network. We employ the software tool GraphCrunch with the Graphlet Degree Distribution Agreement (GDDA) score to examine the use of such counts for network comparison