Network Cleansing: Reliable Interaction Networks

This chapter provides an overview of the current computational methods for PPI network cleansing. The authors first present the issue of identifying reliable PPIs from noisy and incomplete experimental data. Next, they address the questions of which are the expected results of the different experimental studies, of what can be defined as true interactions, of which kind of data are to be integrated in assigning reliability levels to PPIs and which gold standard should the authors use in training and testing PPI filtering methods. Finally, Marcatili and Tramontano describe the state of the art in the field, presenting the different classes of algorithms and comparing their results. The aim of the chapter is to guide the reader in the choice of the most convenient methods, experiments and integrative data and to underline the most common biases and errors to obtain a portrait of PINs which is not only reliable but as well able to correctly retrieve the biological information contained in such data.