diffuStats: an R package to compute diffusion-based scores on biological networks

Bioinformatics. 2018 Feb 1;34(3):533-534. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btx632.

Abstract

Summary: Label propagation and diffusion over biological networks are a common mathematical formalism in computational biology for giving context to molecular entities and prioritizing novel candidates in the area of study. There are several choices in conceiving the diffusion process-involving the graph kernel, the score definitions and the presence of a posterior statistical normalization-which have an impact on the results. This manuscript describes diffuStats, an R package that provides a collection of graph kernels and diffusion scores, as well as a parallel permutation analysis for the normalized scores, that eases the computation of the scores and their benchmarking for an optimal choice.

Availability and implementation: The R package diffuStats is publicly available in Bioconductor, https://bioconductor.org, under the GPL-3 license.

Contact: [email protected].

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Metabolic Networks and Pathways
  • Protein Interaction Maps
  • Software*
  • Yeasts / metabolism