STREAMLINE: Structural and Topological Performance Analysis of Algorithms for the Inference of Gene Regulatory Networks from Single-Cell Transcriptomic Data

STREAMLINE is a refined benchmarking strategy for GRN Inference Algorithms that focuses on the preservation of topological graph properties as well as the identification of hubs. This repository contains all the scripts that are necessary to perform the analysis and reproduce the figures from the paper. The paper that contains our findings and that can be cited was published in Bioinformatics here.

Installing BEELINE

Before starting with STREAMLINE please make sure to have a stable installation of BEELINE available.

Data download

All of the synthetic and experimental data used in the paper can be downloaded here. After extracting the compressed folders (/input and /output), they need to be placed in the /STREAMLINE directory. The experimental folders contain a README.txt file each with instructions on the unzipping of the expression and pseudo time files for the experimental datasets borrowed from here and the unzipping required for the predicted experimental networks by all algorithms.

Adding own data (optional)

If you want to add your own experimental data, the expression files and ground truth networks need to be copied to the /input directory. If you want to add your own synthetic data, the required files for the /input directory are generated by running BoolODE on your synthetic networks:

python boolode.py --config config-files/#yourconfig.yaml

More information on how to use BoolODE is available here. In both cases, after adding files to the /input folder, a matching config file has to be created in the /config-files folder.

GRN inference (optional)

All inputs for rerunning the GRN inference on our synthetical and experimental data should be located in the /input folder after both Zenodo downloads. In addtion, we also provide the precomputed outputs of the inference step for all algorithms in the /output folder, so this step can be skipped for reproducing the published benchmarking section only. The GRN inference in BEELINE can be done using the following command:

python BLRunner.py --config config-files/#yourconfig.yaml

Benchmarking

The benchmarking scripts are implemented as an extension to BEELINE. The folder /STREAMLINE contains the modified files for the evaluations as described in the developer guide for BEELINE with adapted versions of the BLEvaluator.py and BLEval __init__.py files. The global evaluation (per-graph metrics) based on a single configuration file can be started with the following command:

python BLEvaluator_adapted.py --config config-files/#yourconfig.yaml --STREAMLINE_global 

The local evaluation (per-node metrics) based on a single configuration file can be started with the following command:

python BLEvaluator_adapted.py --config config-files/#yourconfig.yaml --STREAMLINE_local 

The standard setting evaluates the undirected networks. To run the directed networks, add the --directed flag to the commands. Verbose output can be activated by adding the --verbose flag.

For the datasets used in the paper, we also provide a bash script to run the pipeline on all datasets very fast. The script can be started with:

bash STREAMLINE.sh

If you add the -l flag, it will run the local (per-node) evaluation, if you add the -g flag it will run the global (per-graph) evluation and if you add the -sflag, it will run the statistical edge detection (EPr / AUC). If you add the -d flag, it will run the evaluations on directed graphs. The script always runs the synthetic networks, if you want to add the experimental networks as well, you can add the -e flag. The flags can also be combined, e.g. the following command runs the local and global version for synthetic and experimental data:

bash STREAMLINE.sh -lge