Journal Article

A systematic survey of centrality measures for protein-protein interaction networks

Salehzadeh-Yazdi, Ali, Hennig, Holger, Razaghi-Moghadam, Zahra, Jafari, Mohieddin, Mirzaie, Mehdi, Ashtiani, Minoo, Wolkenhauer, Olaf

2018

Overview

Background Numerous centrality measures have been introduced to identify “central” nodes in large networks. The availability of a wide range of measures for ranking influential nodes leaves the user to decide which measure may best suit the analysis of a given network. The choice of a suitable measure is furthermore complicated by the impact of the network topology on ranking influential nodes by centrality measures. To approach this problem systematically, we examined the centrality profile of nodes of yeast protein-protein interaction networks (PPINs) in order to detect which centrality measure is succeeding in predicting influential proteins. We studied how different topological network features are reflected in a large set of commonly used centrality measures. Results We used yeast PPINs to compare 27 common of centrality measures. The measures characterize and assort influential nodes of the networks. We applied principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical clustering and found that the most informative measures depend on the network’s topology. Interestingly, some measures had a high level of contribution in comparison to others in all PPINs, namely Latora closeness, Decay, Lin, Freeman closeness, Diffusion, Residual closeness and Average distance centralities. Conclusions The choice of a suitable set of centrality measures is crucial for inferring important functional properties of a network. We concluded that undertaking data reduction using unsupervised machine learning methods helps to choose appropriate variables (centrality measures). Hence, we proposed identifying the contribution proportions of the centrality measures with PCA as a prerequisite step of network analysis before inferring functional consequences, e.g., essentiality of a node.

• Publisher: BioMed Central,BioMed Central Ltd
• Subject: Algorithms / Bioinformatics / Biomedical and Life Sciences / Cellular and Medical Topics / Cluster analysis / Clustering / Computational Biology/Bioinformatics / Data reduction / Learning algorithms / Life Sciences / Machine learning / Methods / Network analysis / Network topologies / Networks / Networks and information flow / Nodes / Physiological / Principal components analysis / Protein interaction / Protein research / Protein-protein interactions / Proteins / Rangefinding / Ranking / Research Article / Simulation and Modeling / Social network analysis / Social networks / Software / Surveys / Systems Biology / Topology / Yeast