PBNA: An Improved Probabilistic Biological Network Alignment Method

Biological network alignment is an important research topic in the field of bioinformatics. Nowadays almost every existing alignment method is designed to solve the deterministic biological network alignment problem. However, it is worth noting that interactions in biological networks, like many other processes in the biological realm, are probabilistic events. Therefore, more accurate and better results can be obtained if biological networks are characterized by probabilistic graphs. This probabilistic information, however, increases difficulties in analyzing networks and only few methods can handle the probabilistic information. Therefore, in this paper, an improved Probabilistic Biological Network Alignment (PBNA) is proposed. Based on IsoRank, PBNA is able to use the probabilistic information. Furthermore, PBNA takes advantages of Contributor and Probability Generating Function (PGF) to improve the accuracy of node similarity value and reduce the computational complexity of random variables in similarity matrix. Experimental results on dataset of the Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) networks provided by Todor demonstrate that PBNA can produce some alignment results that ignored by the deterministic methods, and produce more biologically meaningful alignment results than IsoRank does in most of the cases based on the Gene Ontology Consistency (GOC) measure. Compared with Prob method, which is designed exactly to solve the probabilistic alignment problem, PBNA can obtain more biologically meaningful mappings in less time.