GENIE3

Reconstructing gene regulatory networks and transcription factor activity is crucial to understand biological processes and holds potential for developing personalized treatment. Yet, it is still an open problem as state-of-art algorithm are often not able to handle large amounts of data. Furthermore, many of the present methods predict numerous false positives and are unable to integrate other sources of information such as previously known interactions. Here we introduce KBoost, an algorithm that uses kernel PCA regression, boosting and Bayesian model averaging for fast and accurate reconstruction of gene regulatory networks. KBoost can also use a prior network built on previously known transcription factor targets. We have benchmarked KBoost using three different datasets against other high performing algorithms. The results show that our method compares favourably to other methods across datasets.

Pigengene package provides an efficient way to infer biological signatures from gene expression profiles. The signatures are independent from the underlying platform, e.g., the input can be microarray or RNA Seq data. It can even infer the signatures using data from one platform, and evaluate them on the other. Pigengene identifies the modules (clusters) of highly coexpressed genes using coexpression network analysis, summarizes the biological information of each module in an eigengene, learns a Bayesian network that models the probabilistic dependencies between modules, and builds a decision tree based on the expression of eigengenes.

BioNERO aims to integrate all aspects of biological network inference in a single package, including data preprocessing, exploratory analyses, network inference, and analyses for biological interpretations. BioNERO can be used to infer gene coexpression networks (GCNs) and gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from gene expression data. Additionally, it can be used to explore topological properties of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. GCN inference relies on the popular WGCNA algorithm. GRN inference is based on the "wisdom of the crowds" principle, which consists in inferring GRNs with multiple algorithms (here, CLR, GENIE3 and ARACNE) and calculating the average rank for each interaction pair. As all steps of network analyses are included in this package, BioNERO makes users avoid having to learn the syntaxes of several packages and how to communicate between them. Finally, users can also identify consensus modules across independent expression sets and calculate intra and interspecies module preservation statistics between different networks.

This package uses bayesian network learning to detect relationships between Gene Modules detected by WGCNA and immune cell signatures defined by xCell. It is a hypothesis generating tool.

The iNETgrate package provides functions to build a correlation network in which nodes are genes. DNA methylation and gene expression data are integrated to define the connections between genes. This network is used to identify modules (clusters) of genes. The biological information in each of the resulting modules is represented by an eigengene. These biological signatures can be used as features e.g., for classification of patients into risk categories. The resulting biological signatures are very robust and give a holistic view of the underlying molecular changes.

SCUDO (Signature-based Clustering for Diagnostic Purposes) is a rank-based method for the analysis of gene expression profiles for diagnostic and classification purposes. It is based on the identification of sample-specific gene signatures composed of the most up- and down-regulated genes for that sample. Starting from gene expression data, functions in this package identify sample-specific gene signatures and use them to build a graph of samples. In this graph samples are joined by edges if they have a similar expression profile, according to a pre-computed similarity matrix. The similarity between the expression profiles of two samples is computed using a method similar to GSEA. The graph of samples can then be used to perform community clustering or to perform supervised classification of samples in a testing set.