title: Probabilistic discovery of overlapping cellular processes and their regulation.
abstract: In this paper, we explore modeling overlapping biological processes. We discuss a probabilistic model of overlapping biological processes, gene membership in those processes, and an addition to that model that identifies regulatory mechanisms controlling process activation. A key feature of our approach is that we allow genes to participate in multiple processes, thus providing a more biologically plausible model for the process of gene regulation. We present algorithms to learn each model automatically from data, using only genomewide measurements of gene expression as input. We compare our results to those obtained by other approaches and show that significant benefits can be gained by modeling both the organization of genes into overlapping cellular processes and the regulatory programs of these processes. Moreover, our method successfully grouped genes known to function together, recovered many regulatory relationships that are known in the literature, and suggested novel hypotheses regarding the regulatory role of previously uncharacterized proteins.
authors.affiliation: Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-9010, USA. ajbattle@stanfordalumni.org
authors.forename: Alexis
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Battle
authors.forename: Eran
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Segal
authors.forename: Daphne
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Koller
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation / Q000502:physiology; D005807:Genes, Overlapping; D008954:Models, Biological; D011336:Probability; D012441:Saccharomyces cerevisiae / Q000166:cytology* / Q000235:genetics* / Q000502:physiology