Mouse obesity network reconstruction with a variational Bayes algorithm to employ aggressive false positive control

Benjamin A Logsdon, Gabriel E Hoffman, Jason G Mezey

We propose a novel variational Bayes network reconstruction algorithm to extract the most relevant disease factors from high-throughput genomic data-sets. Our algorithm is the only scalable method for regularized network recovery that employs Bayesian model averaging and that can internally estimate an appropriate level of sparsity to ensure few false positives enter the model without the need for cross-validation or a model selection criterion. We use our algorithm to characterize the effect of genetic markers and liver gene expression traits on mouse obesity related phenotypes, including weight, cholesterol, glucose, and free fatty acid levels, in an experiment previously used for discovery and validation of network connections: an F2 intercross between the C57BL/6 J and C3H/HeJ mouse strains, where apolipoprotein E is null on the background.