Coffee served at 3:30 in conjunction with WID Discovey.  Non-building occupants meet at room 3280.

Sushmita Roy, Asst Professor, Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, UW-Madison

Title: Learning networks in biology: opportunities and challenges

A systems-level understanding of how living system function requires us to identify the parts of a system and the interactions between these parts. More importantly, the interactions of a system may be “condition-specific”, where a condition could represent a different environmental stress, a cell-type, a disease or different organisms. Advances in biotechnology are enabling us to identify the parts of a system, however, identifying the interactions remains a difficult problem. I will discuss the inference and analysis of these networks in the usual setting of learning a single network, and then in a more interesting setting of simultaneous learning of multiple networks. I will present the challenges in learning these networks, specifically, when we aim to do this at the genome-scale, with thousands of nodes. I will present some of our approaches, based on probabilistic graphical models, to address this problem that allows us to use search heuristics and incorporate prior knowledge into system to make the problem more tractable and the networks more biologically realistic.