PREMER: A Tool to Infer Biological Networks

Inferring the structure of unknown cellular networks is a main challenge in computational biology. Data-driven approaches based on information theory can determine the existence of interactions among network nodes automatically. However, the elucidation of certain features—such as distinguishing between direct and indirect interactions or determining the direction of a causal link—requires estimating information-theoretic quantities in a multidimensional space. This can be a computationally demanding task, which acts as a bottleneck for the application of elaborate algorithms to large-scale network inference problems. The computational cost of such calculations can be alleviated by the use of compiled programs and parallelization. To this end, we have developed PREMER (Parallel Reverse Engineering with Mutual information & Entropy Reduction), a software toolbox that can run in parallel and sequential environments. It uses information theoretic criteria to recover network topology and determine the strength and causality of interactions, and allows incorporating prior knowledge, imputing missing data, and correcting outliers. PREMER is a free, open source software tool that does not require any commercial software. Its core algorithms are programmed in FORTRAN 90 and implement OpenMP directives. It has user interfaces in Python and MATLAB/Octave, and runs on Windows, Linux, and OSX (https://sites.google.com/site/premertoolbox/).

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