Foundations of semialgebraic gene-environment networks

Abstract

Gene-environment network studies rely on data originating from different disciplines such as chemistry, biology, psychology or social sciences. Sophisticated regulatory models are required for a deeper investigation of the unknown and hidden functional relationships between genetic and environmental factors. At the same time, various kinds of uncertainty can arise and interfere with the system's evolution. The aim of this study is to go beyond traditional stochastic approaches and to propose a novel framework of semialgebraic gene-environment networks. Foundation is laid for future research, methodology and application. This approach is a natural extension of interconnected systems based on stochastic, polyhedral, ellipsoidal or fuzzy (linguistic) uncertainty. It allows for a reconstruction of the underlying network from uncertain (semialgebraic) data sets and for a prediction of the uncertain futures states of the system. In addition, aspects of network pruning for large regulatory systems in genome-wide studies are discussed leading to mixed-integer programming (MIP) and continuous programming.