Performance Evaluations of Active Subnetwork Search Methods in Protein-Protein Interaction Networks

Protein-protein interaction networks are mathematical representations of the physical contacts between proteins in the cell. A group of interconnected proteins in a protein-protein interaction network that contains most of the disease associated proteins and some interacting other proteins is called an active subnetwork. Active subnetwork search is important to understand mechanisms underlying diseases. Active subnetworks are used to discover disease related regulatory pathways, functional modules and to classify diseases. In the literature there are many methods to search for active subnetworks. The purpose of this study is to compare the performance of different subnetwork identification methods. By using the Rheumatoid Arthritis dataset, the performances of greedy approach, genetic algorithm, simulated annealing algorithm, prize collecting steiner forest and game theory based subnetwork search methods are compared.