Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA.
Brief Bioinform. 2011 May;12(3):245-52. doi: 10.1093/bib/bbq078. Epub 2010 Dec 22.
Gene regulatory network models are a major area of study in systems and computational biology and the construction of network models is among the most important problems in these disciplines. The critical epistemological issue concerns validation. Validity can be approached from two different perspectives (i) given a hypothesized network model, its scientific validity relates to the ability to make predictions from the model that can be checked against experimental observations; and (ii) the validity of a network inference procedure must be evaluated relative to its ability to infer a network from sample points generated by the network. This article examines both perspectives in the framework of a distance function between two networks. It considers some of the obstacles to validation and provides examples of both validation paradigms.
基因调控网络模型是系统和计算生物学的一个主要研究领域，网络模型的构建是这些学科中最重要的问题之一。关键的认识论问题涉及验证。可以从两个不同的角度来看待有效性（i）给定一个假设的网络模型，其科学有效性与从模型中进行预测的能力有关，这些预测可以与实验观察结果相比较；（ii）网络推断程序的有效性必须相对于其从网络生成的样本点推断网络的能力进行评估。本文在两个网络之间的距离函数框架内考察了这两个角度。它考虑了一些验证障碍，并提供了这两种验证范例的示例。
