Merging network patterns: a general framework to summarize biomedical network data

The ability to summarize a large number of network patterns discovered from biomedical data provides valuable information for use in many applications. We show that several variants of the problem are all NP-hard, and merging network patterns is a practical solution for these applications. In this work, we propose an algorithmic framework for merging network patterns. We have developed fast algorithms under this general framework which supports several types of biomedical network data. In addition, our empirical study demonstrates that our algorithms are efficient in merging a large number of biomedical network patterns and can be configured for various knowledge discovery purposes.