We propose a statistical method for estimating a gene network based on Bayesian networks from microarray gene expression data together with biological knowledge including protein-protein interactions, protein-DNA interactions, binding site information, existing literature and so on. Unfortunately, microarray data do not contain enough information for constructing gene networks accurately in many cases. Our method adds biological knowledge to the estimation method of gene networks under a Bayesian statistical framework, and also controls the trade-off between microarray information and biological knowledge automatically. We conduct Monte Carlo simulations to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. We analyze Saccharomyces cerevisiae gene expression data as an application. 1.

We propose a new statistical method for constructing a genetic network from microarray gene expression data by using a Bayesian network. An essential point of Bayesian network construction is in the estimation of the conditional distribution of each random variable. We consider fitting nonparametric regression models with heterogeneous error variances to the microarray gene expression data to capture the nonlinear structures between genes. A problem still remains to be solved in selecting an optimal graph, which gives the best representation of the system among genes. We theoretically derive a new graph selection criterion from Bayes approach in general situations. The proposed method includes previous methods based on Bayesian networks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through the analysis of Saccharomyces cerevisiae gene expression data newly obtained by disrupting 100 genes. 1.

High-throughput proteomic data can be used to reveal the connectivity of signaling networks and the influences between signaling molecules. We present a primer on the use of Bayesian networks for this task. Bayesian networks have been successfully used to derive causal influences among biological signaling molecules (for example, in the analysis of intracellular multicolor flow cytometry). We discuss ways to automatically derive a Bayesian network model from proteomic data and to interpret the resulting model.

Abstract Motivation: A central goal of molecular biology is to understand the regulatory mechanisms of gene transcription and protein synthesis. Because of their solid basis in statistics, allowing to deal with the stochastic aspects of gene expressions and noisy measurements in a natural way, Bayesian networks appear attractive in the field of inferring gene interactions structure from microarray experiments data. However, the basic formalism has some disadvantages, e.g. it is sometimes hard to distinguish between the origin and the object of an interaction. Two kinds of microarray experiments yield data particularly rich in information regarding the direction of interactions: time series and perturbation experiments. In order to correctly handle them, the basic formalism must be modified. For example, dynamic Bayesian networks apply to time series microarray data. Results: We extend the framework of dynamic Bayesian networks in order to handle perturbations. A new discretization method, specialized for datasets from time series perturbations experiments, is also introduced. We compare networks inferred from realistic simulations data by our method and by dynamic Bayesian networks learning techniques. We conclude that application of our method substantially improves inferring. 1 Introduction As most genetic regulatory systems involve many components connected through complex networks of interactions, formal methods and computer tools for modeling and simulating are needed. Therefore, various formalisms were proposed to describe genetic regulatory systems, including Boolean networks and their generalizations, ordinary and partial differential equations, stochastic equations and Bayesian networks (see [4] for a review). While differential and stochastic equations describe the biophysical processes at a very refined level of detail and prove useful in simulations of well studied systems, Bayesian networks appear attractive in the field of inferring the regulatory network structure from gene expression data. The reason is that their learning techniques have solid basis in statistics, allowing to deal with the stochastic aspects of gene expressions and noisy measurements in a natural way.

Recent technological advances in high-throughput data collection allow for experimental study of increasingly complex systems on the scale of the whole cellular genome and proteome. Gene network models are needed to interpret the resulting large and complex data sets. Rationally designed perturbations (e.g., gene knock-outs) can be used to iteratively refine hypothetical models, suggesting an approach for high-throughput biological system analysis. We introduce an approach to gene network modeling based on a scalable linear variant of fuzzy logic: a framework with greater resolution than Boolean logic models, but which, while still semi-quantitative, does not require the precise parameter measurement needed for chemical kinetics-based modeling.

In gene network estimation from time series microarray data, dynamic models such as differential equations and dynamic Bayesian networks assume that the network structure is stable through all time points, while the real network might changes its structure depending on time, affection of some shocks and so on. If the true network structure underlying the data changes at certain points, the fitting of the usual dynamic linear models fails to estimate the structure of gene network and we cannot obtain efficient information from data. To solve this problem, we propose a dynamic linear model with Markov switching for estimating timedependent gene network structure from time series gene expression data. Using our proposed method, the network structure between genes and its change points are automatically estimated. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through the analysis of Saccharomyces cerevisiae cell cycle time series data. 1.

Since microarray gene expression data do not contain sufficient information for estimating accurate gene networks, other biological information has been considered to improve the estimated networks. Recent studies have revealed that highly conserved proteins that exhibit similar expression patterns in different organisms, have almost the same function in each organism. Such conserved proteins are also known to play similar roles in terms of the regulation of genes. Therefore, this evolutionary information can be used to refine regulatory relationships among genes, which are estimated from gene expression data. We propose a statistical method for estimating gene networks from gene expression data by utilizing evolutionarily conserved relationships between genes. Our method simultaneously estimates two gene networks of two distinct organisms, with a Bayesian network model utilizing the evolutionary information so that gene expression data of one organism helps to estimate the gene network of the other. We show the effectiveness of the method through the analysis on Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Homo sapiens cell cycle gene expression data. Our method was successful in estimating gene networks that capture many known relationships as well as several unknown relationships which are likely to be novel. Supplementary information is available at

Exploring gene regulatory network is a key topic in molecular biology. In this paper, we present a new dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) framework embedded with structural expectation maximization (SEM) to model gene relationship. It is well-suited for analyzing the time-series data and can deal with cyclical structures that can not be tackled by static Bayesian network. We applied the new method to learning the regulatory network and the metabolic pathway from Saccharomyces Cerevisiae cell cycle gene expression data. The results show that the proposed method is capable of handling missing values in expression data sets, and the inference accuracy can further be improved.

Abstract. Inferring the metabolic pathways that control the cell cycles is a challenging and difficult task. However, its importance in the process of understanding living organisms has been leading to the development of several models to infer gene regulatory networks from DNA microarray data. In the last years, many works have been adding biological information to those models to improve the obtained results. In this work, we add prior biological knowledge into a Bayesian Network model with non parametric regression and analyze the effects caused by such information in the results. 1

We propose a novel statistical method for estimating gene networks based on microarray gene expression data together with information from biological knowledge databases. Although a large amount of gene regulation information has already been stored in some biological databases, there are still errors and missing facts due to experimental problems and human errors. Therefore, we cannot blindly use them for understanding gene regulation and a robust procedure with a statistical model for using such database information is required. By using gene expression data, we provide a probabilistic framework of a joint learning model for repairing database information and for estimating a gene network based on dynamic Bayesian networks, simultaneously. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, we analyze Saccharomyces cerevisiae cell-cycle gene expression data together with KEGG information.