A resampling method of time course gene expression data for gene network inference

Abstract

Manipulation of cellular functions may aid in treatment and/or cure of a disease. Thus, identifying the topology of a gene regulatory network (GRN) and the molecular role of each gene is essential. Discovering GRNs from gene expression data is hampered by intrinsic attributes of the data: small sample size n, large number of variables (genes) p, and unknown error structure. Numerous theoretical approaches for GRN inference attempt to overcome these difficulties; however, most solutions utilized in these methods are to provide either point estimators such as coefficient estimators or make numerous assumptions which are often incompatible with the data. Furthermore, the different solutions cause GRN inference methods to provide inconsistent results. This dissertation proposes a resampling method for time-course gene expression data which can provide interval estimators for existing GRN inference methods without any distributional assumptions via bootstrapping and a statistical model that considers the various components of the data structure such as trend of gene expressions, errors of time-course data, and correlation between genes, etc. This method will produce more precise GRNs that are consistent with observed gene expression data. Furthermore, by applying our method to multiple existing GRN inference methods, the resulting networks obtained from different inference methods could be combined using the joint confidence region for their parameters. Thus, this method can be used for the validation of identified networks and GRN inference methods.