An efficient algorithm to integrate network and attribute data for gene function prediction

Label propagation methods are extremely well-suited for a variety of biomedical prediction tasks based on network data. However, these algorithms cannot be used to integrate feature-based data sources with networks. We propose an efficient learning algorithm to integrate these two types of heterogeneous data sources to perform binary prediction tasks on node features (e.g., gene prioritization, disease gene prediction). Our method, LMGraph, consists of two steps. In the first step, we extract a small set of "network features" from the nodes of networks that represent connectivity with labeled nodes in the prediction tasks. In the second step, we apply a simple weighting scheme in conjunction with linear classifiers to combine these network features with other feature data. This two-step procedure allows us to (i) learn highly scalable and computationally efficient linear classifiers, (ii) and seamlessly combine feature-based data sources with networks. Our method is much faster than label propagation which is already known to be computationally efficient on large-scale prediction problems. Experiments on multiple functional interaction networks from three species (mouse, y, C.elegans) with tens of thousands of nodes and hundreds of binary prediction tasks demonstrate the efficacy of our method.