Some protein interaction data do not exhibit power law statistics

Abstract

It has been claimed that protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks are scale-free based on the observation that the node degree sequence follows a power law. Here we argue that these claims are likely to be based on erroneous statistical analysis. Typically, the supporting data are presented using frequency-degree plots. We show that such plots can be misleading, and should correctly be replaced by rank-degree plots. We provide two PPI network examples in which the frequency-degree plots appear linear on a log-log scale, but the rank-degree plots demonstrate that the node degree sequence is far from a power law. We conclude that at least these PPI networks are not scale-free.