BioData Mining

The inference of biological networks is a highly relevant and challenging task in systems biology and integrative bioinformatics. Biological networks are graphs in which nodes represent genes or proteins, and a connection between them indicates some kind of biological relationship, e.g. regulatory or functional. The network inference is, in an essence, an attempt to reverse engineer the biological relationships from the high-throughput biological data [1]. Most biological network inference methods focus on the definition of gene regulatory networks, in which edges represent direct regulatory interactions between genes [2–4]. Far less effort has been put into the design of methods to build functional networks in which a connection indicates a functional relationship, e.g.