1 Systems Biology Incorporating Prior Knowledge into Gene Network Study

Motivation: A major goal in genomic research is to identify genes that may jointly influence a biological response. From many years of intensive biomedical research, a large body of biological knowledge, or pathway information, has accumulated in available databases. There is a strong interest in leveraging these pathways to improve the statistical power and interpretability in studying gene networks associated with complex phenotypes. This prior information is a valuable complement to large-scale genomic data such as gene expression data generated from microarrays. However, it is a non-trivial task to effectively integrate available biological knowledge into gene expression data when reconstructing gene networks. Results: In this article, we developed and applied a Lasso method from a Bayesian perspective, a method we call prior Lasso (pLasso), for the reconstruction of gene networks. In this method, we partitio