Mining Similar Aspects for Gene Similarity Explanation Based on Gene Information Network

Analysis of gene similarity not only can provide information on the understanding of the biological roles and functions of a gene, but may also reveal the relationships among various genes. In this paper, we introduce a novel idea of mining similar aspects from a gene information network, i.e., for a given gene pair, we want to know in which aspects (meta paths) they are most similar from the perspective of the gene information network. We defined a similarity metric based on the set of meta paths connecting the query genes in the gene information network and used the rank of similarity of a gene pair in a meta path set to measure the similarity significance in that aspect. A minimal set of gene meta paths where the query gene pair ranks the highest is a similar aspect, and the similar aspect of a query gene pair is far from trivial. We proposed a novel method, SCENARIO, to investigate minimal similar aspects. Our empirical study on the gene information network, constructed from six public gene-related databases, verified that our proposed method is effective, efficient, and useful.