BalanceAli: Multiple PPI Network Alignment With Balanced High Coverage and Consistency

Coverage and consistency are two most considered metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of network alignment. But they are a pair of contradictory evaluation metrics in protein-protein interaction (PPI) network alignment. It is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve high coverage and consistency simultaneously. Furthermore, existing methods of multiple PPI network alignment mostly ignore k-coverage or k-consistency, where k indicates the number of aligned species. In this paper, we propose BalanceAli, a novel approach for global alignment of multiple PPI networks that achieves high k-coverage and k-consistency simultaneously. With six data sets consisting of various numbers of PPI networks from five species, we evaluate the experimental results using different k values. The performance evaluations of our approach against other three state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the preferable comprehensive strength of our approach.