We propose a novel method for simulating the effects of gene silencing. Our approach combines relevant subject matter information provided by biological pathways with gene expression levels measured in regular conditions to predict the behaviour of the system after one of the genes has been silenced. We achieve this by modelling gene silencing as an external intervention in a causal graphical model. To account for the uncertainty that is associated with the structure learning of the graphical model, we adopt a bootstrap approach. We illustrate our proposal on a Drosophila melanogaster gene silencing experiment.

中文翻译：

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通过干预分析模拟基因沉默

我们提出了一种模拟基因沉默效应的新方法。我们的方法将生物学途径提供的相关主题信息与在常规条件下测得的基因表达水平相结合，以预测某个基因被沉默后系统的行为。我们通过将基因沉默建模为因果图形模型中的外部干预来实现此目的。为了解决与图形模型的结构学习相关的不确定性，我们采用了一种自举方法。我们在果蝇基因沉默实验中说明了我们的建议。