Statistical Approaches for the Construction and Interpretation of Human Protein-Protein Interaction Network

The overall goal is to establish a reliable human protein-protein interaction network and develop computational tools to characterize a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network and the role of individual proteins in the context of the network topology and their expression status. A novel and unique feature of our approach is that we assigned confidence measure to each derived interacting pair and account for the confidence in our network analysis. We integrated experimental data to infer human PPI network. Our model treated the true interacting status (yes versus no) for any given pair of human proteins as a latent variable whose value was not observed. The experimental data were the manifestation of interacting status, which provided evidence as to the likelihood of the interaction. The confidence of interactions would depend on the strength and consistency of the evidence.