Diffusion scores on biological networks
Label propagation approaches are a widely used procedure in computational biology for giving context to molecular entities using network data. Node labels, which can derive from gene expression, genome-wide association studies, protein domains or metabolomics profiling, are propagated to their neighbours in the network, effectively smoothing the scores through prior annotated knowledge and prioritising novel candidates. The R package diffuStats contains a collection of diffusion kernels and scoring approaches that facilitates their computation, characterisation and benchmarking.
