A Multiple Regression Approach for Building Genetic Networks

The construction of genetic regulatory networks from time series gene expression data is an important research topic in bioinformatics as large amounts of quantitative gene expression data can be routinely generated nowadays. One of the main difficulties in building such genetic networks is that the data set has huge number of genes but small number of time points. In this paper, we propose a linear regression model for uncovering the relations among the genes by using multiple regression method with filtering. The model takes into account of the fact that real biological networks have the scale-free property. Based on this property and the statistical tests, a filter can be constructed and the interactions among the genes can be inferred by minimizing the distance between the observed data and the predicted data. Numerical examples based on yeast gene expression data are given to demonstrate our method.