ComHub: Community predictions of hubs in gene regulatory networks

Hub transcription factors, regulating many target genes in gene regulatory networks (GRNs), play important roles as disease regulators and potential drug targets. However, while numerous methods have been developed to predict individual regulator-gene interactions from gene expression data, few methods focus on inferring these hubs. We have developed ComHub, a tool to predict hubs in GRNs. ComHub makes a community prediction of hubs by averaging over predictions by a compendium of network inference methods. Benchmarking ComHub to the DREAM5 challenge data and an independent data set of human gene expression, proved a robust performance of ComHub over all data sets. Lastly, we implemented ComHub to work with both predefined networks and to do standard network inference, which we believe will make it generally applicable. Availability: Code is available at https://gitlab.com/Gustafsson-lab/comhub Contact: mika.gustafsson@liu.se, rasmus.magnusson@liu.se