Differential co-expression-based detection of conditional relationships in transcriptional data: comparative analysis and application to breast cancer

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Elucidation of regulatory networks, including identification of regulatory mechanisms specific to a given biological context, is a key aim in systems biology. This has motivated the move from co-expression to differential co-expression analysis and numerous methods have been developed subsequently to address this task; however, evaluation of methods and interpretation of the resulting networks has been hindered by the lack of known context-specific regulatory interactions. RESULTS: In this study, we develop a simulator based on dynamical systems modelling capable of simulating differential co-expression patterns. With the simulator and an evaluation framework, we benchmark and ch..