Incorporating K-mers Highly Correlated to Epigenetic Modifications for Bayesian Inference of Gene Interactions

Objective: A gene interaction network, along with its related biological features, has an important role in computational biology. Bayesian network, as an efficient model, based on probabilistic concepts is able to exploit known and novel biological casual relationships between genes. The success of Bayesian networks in predicting the relationships greatly depends on selecting priors. Methods: K-mers have been applied as the prominent features to uncover the similarity between genes in a specific pathway, suggesting that this feature can be applied to study genes dependencies. In this study, we propose k-mers (4,5 and 6-mers) highly correlated with epigenetic modifications, including 17 modifications, as a new prior for Bayesian inference in the gene interaction network. Result: Employing this model on a network of 23 human genes and on a network based on 27 genes related to yeast resulted in F-measure improvements in different biological networks. Conclusion: The improvements in the best case are 12%, 36%, and 10% in the pathway, coexpression, and physical interaction, respectively.