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Causal Queries from Observational Data in Biological Systems via Bayesian Networks: An Empirical Study in Small Networks

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Gene Regulatory Networks

Part of the book series: Methods in Molecular Biology ((MIMB,volume 1883))

Abstract

Biological networks are a very convenient modeling and visualization tool to discover knowledge from modern high-throughput genomics and post-genomics data sets. Indeed, biological entities are not isolated but are components of complex multilevel systems. We go one step further and advocate for the consideration of causal representations of the interactions in living systems. We present the causal formalism and bring it out in the context of biological networks, when the data is observational. We also discuss its ability to decipher the causal information flow as observed in gene expression. We also illustrate our exploration by experiments on small simulated networks as well as on a real biological data set.

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Acknowledgements

Alex White was partly supported by a Summer Scholarship grant from the Institute of Fundamental Sciences at Massey University (NZ). This work was also supported by a visiting professor scholarship from Aix-Marseille University granted to Matthieu Vignes in 2017. The material in this chapter slowly hatched after many discussions with a multitude of quantitative field colleagues and biologists during some works we were involved in, e.g., [34, 131, 147], but most of our inspiration stems from other works we read about and discussed (e.g., [60, 113, 146, 148, 149] to cite only a few). We are very appreciative of the many discussions with Stephen Marsland (Victoria University of Wellington, NZ). Lastly, we are very grateful to the reviewers of this chapter for their insightful comments.

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  1. Institute of Fundamental Sciences, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

    Alex White & Matthieu Vignes

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  1. Alex White
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  1. School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Guido Sanguinetti

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium

    Vân Anh Huynh-Thu

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White, A., Vignes, M. (2019). Causal Queries from Observational Data in Biological Systems via Bayesian Networks: An Empirical Study in Small Networks. In: Sanguinetti, G., Huynh-Thu, V. (eds) Gene Regulatory Networks. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1883. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-8882-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-8882-2_5

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