Estimating cellular redundancy in networks of genetic expression

Abstract

Networks of genetic expression can be modelled by hypergraphs with the additional structure that real coefficients are given to each vertex-edge incidence. The spectra, i.e. the multiset of the eigenvalues, of such hypergraphs, are known to encode structural information of the data. We show how these spectra can be used, in particular, in order to give an estimation of cellular redundancy, a novel measure of gene expression heterogeneity, of the network. We analyze some simulated and real data sets of gene expression for illustrating the new method proposed here.