Generating probabilistic Boolean networks from a prescribed transition probability matrix

Probabilistic Boolean networks (PBNs) have received much attention in modeling genetic regulatory networks. A PBN can be regarded as a Markov chain process and is characterised by a transition probability matrix. In this study, the authors propose efficient algorithms for constructing a PBN when its transition probability matrix is given. The complexities of the algorithms are also analysed. This is an interesting inverse problem in network inference using steady-state data. The problem is important as most microarray data sets are assumed to be obtained from sampling the steady-state.