Partial correlation network analysis identifies coordinated gene expression within a regional cluster of COPD genome-wide association signals
Fig 2
The first box shows how the COPD and the Differential partial correlation networks have been built. Given a source of biological information, such as a PPI network or set of functional annotations, for every gene i and j (gi,gj) we extract the gene specific regularization vector λi,j, that contains the distance between gene gi and gj to all of the other genes, in our case the inverse of the personalized PageRank algorithm (more details in S1 Text). For every pair of genes (gi,gj), we compute the Gene-Specific Ridge Partial Correlation. Finally, to build the partial correlation network we run a t-test, using permutation and bootstrap procedures, respectively. The second box contains the analysis done on the two networks from (1) the COPD subjects and (2) a differential network of COPD patients vs Healthy controls. Both analyses provide insights into the presence of a potential co-regulatory network in this genomic region.