Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 28, 2026

Generating the Transcriptional Regulation View of Transcriptomic Features for Prediction Task and Dark Biomarker Detection on Small Datasets
Published on: March 1, 2024
minet: A R/Bioconductor package for inferring large transcriptional networks using mutual information
Patrick E Meyer1, Frédéric Lafitte, Gianluca Bontempi
1Machine Learning Group, Computer Science Department, Faculty of Science, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1050 Brussels, Belgium. pmeyer@ulb.ac.be
Results:
This paper presents the R/Bioconductor package minet (version 1.1.6) which provides a set of functions to infer mutual information networks from a dataset. Once fed with a microarray dataset, the package returns a network where nodes denote genes, edges model statistical dependencies between genes and the weight of an edge quantifies the statistical evidence of a specific (e.g transcriptional) gene-to-gene interaction. Four different entropy estimators are made available in the package minet (empirical, Miller-Madow, Schurmann-Grassberger and shrink) as well as four different inference methods, namely relevance networks, ARACNE, CLR and MRNET. Also, the package integrates accuracy assessment tools, like F-scores, PR-curves and ROC-curves in order to compare the inferred network with a reference one.
Conclusion:
The package minet provides a series of tools for inferring transcriptional networks from microarray data. It is freely available from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) as well as from the Bioconductor website.
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