ANCA: Alignment-Based Network Construction Algorithm

Dynamic biological networks model changes in the network topology over time. However, often the topologies of these networks are not available at specific time points. Existing algorithms for studying dynamic networks often ignore this problem and focus only on the time points at which experimental data is available. In this paper, we develop a novel alignment based network construction algorithm, ANCA, that constructs the dynamic networks at the missing time points by exploiting the information from a reference dynamic network. Our experiments on synthetic and real networks demonstrate that ANCA predicts the missing target networks accurately, and scales to large-scale biological networks in practical time. Our analysis of an E. coli protein-protein interaction network shows that ANCA successfully identifies key temporal changes in the biological networks. Our analysis also suggests that by focusing on the topological differences in the network, our method can be used to find important genes and temporal functional changes in the biological networks.