Biological network epitomes via topological compression

High-throughput generation of new types of relational biological datasets is creating a demand for network-based signal processing and pattern recognition to provide new insights. Such networks are often too large to interpret visually and too complicated to be explained solely based on local topological properties. Just as signal processing and statistical techniques have been used in traditional, sequential-based biological datasets, so too are methodologies needed to automatically discern patterns in the huge, emerging networks. One way to do this is by transforming these very large networks into discernable epitomes, or abstracts, of the original networks. This work presents an approach for doing this via topological compression. Through capturing nodes' global topologies and subsequent compression, a new network epitome can be derived. Here, this is done with an E. Coli gene regulation network, resulting in biological findings that could not be derived from the local topology of the original network.