Paper detail

Biological network comparison via Ipsen-Mikhailov distance

Highlighting similarities and differences between networks is an informative task in investigating many biological processes. Typical examples are detecting differences between an inferred network and the corresponding gold standard, or evaluating changes in a dynamic network along time. Although fruitful insights can be drawn by qualitative or feature-based methods, a distance must be used whenever a quantitative assessment is required. Here we introduce the Ipsen-Mikhailov metric for biological network comparison, based on the difference of the distributions of the Laplacian eigenvalues of the compared graphs. Being a spectral measure, its focus is on the general structure of the net so it can overcome the issues affecting local metrics such as the edit distances. Relation with the classical Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) is discussed, showing the finer discriminant resolution achieved by the Ipsen-Mikhailov metric. We conclude with three examples of application in functional genomic tasks, including stability of network reconstruction as robustness to data subsampling, variability in dynamical networks and differences in networks associated to a classification task.