Ant colony optimization for inferring key gene interactions

Inferring gene interaction network from gene expression profiles is an important task in systems biology research. The gene interaction network, especially key interactions, plays an important role in identifying biomarkers for disease that further helps in drug design. Ant colony optimization is a nature-inspired swarm-based optimization algorithm that has been used in many optimization problems. In this paper, we applied ant colony optimization algorithm for inferring the key gene interactions from gene expression profiles. The algorithm has been tested on two different kinds of benchmark datasets and observed that it successfully identify some important key gene interactions.