Motivation Even within well studied organisms, many genes lack useful functional annotations. One way to generate such functional information is to infer biological relationships between genes/proteins, using a network of gene coexpression data that includes functional annotations. However, the lack of trustworthy functional annotations can impede the validation of such networks. Hence, there is a need for a principled method to construct gene coexpression networks that capture biological information and are structurally stable even in the absence of functional information. Results We introduce the concept of signed distance correlation as a measure of dependency between two variables, and apply it to generate gene coexpression networks. Distance correlation offers a more intuitive approach to network construction than commonly used methods such as Pearson correlation and mutual information. We propose a framework to generate self-consistent networks using signed distance correlation purely from gene expression data, with no additional information. We analyse data from three different organisms to illustrate how networks generated with our method are more stable and capture more biological information compared to networks obtained from Pearson correlation or mutual information. Supplementary information Supplementary Information and code are available at Bioinformatics and https://github.com/javier-pardodiaz/sdcorGCN online.

Background Protein interaction databases often provide confidence scores for each recorded interaction based on the available experimental evidence. Protein interaction networks (PINs) are then built by thresholding on these scores, so that only interactions of sufficiently high quality are included. These networks are used to identify biologically relevant motifs or nodes using metrics such as degree or betweenness centrality. This type of analysis can be sensitive to the choice of threshold. If a node metric is to be useful for extracting biological signal, it should induce similar node rankings across PINs obtained at different reasonable confidence score thresholds. Results We propose three measures—rank continuity, identifiability, and instability—to evaluate how robust a node metric is to changes in the score threshold. We apply our measures to twenty-five metrics and identify four as the most robust: the number of edges in the step-1 ego network, as well as the leave-one-out differences in average redundancy, average number of edges in the step-1 ego network, and natural connectivity. Our measures show good agreement across PINs from different species and data sources. Analysis of synthetically generated scored networks shows that robustness results are context-specific, and depend both on network topology and on how scores are placed across network edges. Conclusion Due to the uncertainty associated with protein interaction detection, and therefore network structure, for PIN analysis to be reproducible, it should yield similar results across different confidence score thresholds. We demonstrate that while certain node metrics are robust with respect to threshold choice, this is not always the case. Promisingly, our results suggest that there are some metrics that are robust across networks constructed from different databases, and different scoring procedures. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12859-019-3036-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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