RANKS: A flexible tool for node label ranking and classification in biological networks

Valentini, Giorgio;ARMANO, GIULIANO;Frasca, Marco;Lin, Jianyi;Mesiti, Marco;Re, Matteo

2016-01-01

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Abstract

RANKS is a flexible software package that can be easily applied to any bioinformatics task formalizable as ranking of nodes with respect to a property given as a label, such as automated protein function prediction, gene disease prioritization and drug repositioning. To this end RANKS provides an efficient and easy-to-use implementation of kernelized score functions, a semi-supervised algorithmic scheme embedding both local and global learning strategies for the analysis of biomolecular networks. To facilitate comparative assessment, baseline network-based methods, e.g. label propagation and random walk algorithms, have also been implemented.