Analysis of Biological Networks (Wiley Series in Bioinformatics)
Analysis of Biological Networks (Wiley Series in Bioinformatics)
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Network centrality measures allow ranking of nodes and edges based on their importance to the network topology. Closeness centrality [1] and shortest path betweenness centrality [2] are two of the most popular and well-utilized centrality measures that have provided good results [3,4,5,6]. Both of these centralities rely exclusively on topological features of the network [7] to calculate node importance. We propose an improvement to these path length based centrality measures that incorporate node-specific metadata to provide biologically relevant node ranking. We choose gene annotations and gene ontology (GO) evidences as our metadata to highlight the new approach. Application of the newly proposed centrality measures to synthetic networks, and pathogen infected barley's gene co-expression networks resulted in a significantly better prioritization of the nodes. We compared our results against unmodified centrality measures applied to the same networks. Our proposed improvements provide a new avenue for tailoring centrality measures for biological networks, and hold great potential for further improvement of random walk based [8] and motif-based centrality [9] measures.