Aggregate network: For each experiment (i.e. individual GCN), the Pearson’s correlation coefficient (PCC) of each gene against all other genes is first calculated and ranked according to descending PCC and subsequently thresholded to the the top 100 (stringent) and 300 (relaxed) ranked genes. This cutoff equates to a per-gene sparsity/threshold of approximately 0.34% and 1.04% of the 28,811 represented genes. For the construction of the final aggregate GCN, the frequency of co-expression interaction(s) present across individual GCNs (33 in total) were used as edge weights, ranked in descending order, and thresholded to a per-gene sparsity of 0.34% and 1.04%. See Appendix for the full list of experiment datasets used.
Mutual rank network: All 1359 samples (33 experiments) is summarized as a whole and the Pearson’s correlation coefficient (PCC) of each gene against all other genes is first calculated. The formula for MR(A,B) = √(Rank(A→B) × Rank(B→A)), was used to calculate the MR value for each pair-wise genes. Rank(A→B) corresponds to the rank assigned to gene B given the list of co-expression genes from gene A and
vice versa for Rank(B→A). See above for per-gene sparsity/threshold details.