Influence of statistical estimators of mutual information and data heterogeneity on the inference of gene regulatory networks

The inference of gene regulatory networks from gene expression data is a difficult problem because the performance of the inference algorithms depends on a multitude of different factors. In this paper we study two of these. First, we investigate the influence of discrete mutual information (MI) estimators on the global and local network inference performance of the C3NET algorithm. More precisely, we study <inline-formula><inline-graphic xlink:href="info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0029279.e001" mimetype="image" xlink:type="simple" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/></inline-formula> different MI estimators (Empirical, Miller-Madow, Shrink and Schürmann-Grassberger) in combination with <inline-formula><inline-graphic xlink:href="info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0029279.e002" mimetype="image" xlink:type="simple" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/></inline-formula> discretization methods (equal frequency, equal width and global equal width discretization). We observe the best global and local inference performance of C3NET for the Miller-Madow estimator with an equal width discretization. Second, our numerical analysis can be considered as a systems approach because we simulate gene expression data from an underlying gene regulatory network, instead of making a distributional assumption to sample thereof. We demonstrate that despite the popularity of the latter approach, which is the traditional way of studying MI estimators, this is in fact not supported by simulated and biological expression data because of their heterogeneity. Hence, our study provides guidance for an efficient design of a simulation study in the context of network inference, supporting a systems approach.