CNNGRN: A Convolutional Neural Network-Based Method for Gene Regulatory Network Inference From Bulk Time-Series Expression Data

Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) participate in many biological processes, and reconstructing them plays an important role in systems biology. Although many advanced methods have been proposed for GRN reconstruction, their predictive performance is far from the ideal standard, so it is urgent to design a more effective method to reconstruct GRN. Moreover, most methods only consider the gene expression data, ignoring the network structure information contained in GRN. In this study, we propose a supervised model named CNNGRN, which infers GRN from bulk time-series expression data via convolutional neural network (CNN) model, with a more informative feature. Bulk time series gene expression data imply the intricate regulatory associations between genes, and the network structure feature of ground-truth GRN contains rich neighbor information. Hence, CNNGRN integrates the above two features as model inputs. In addition, CNN is adopted to extract intricate features of genes and infer the potential associations between regulators and target genes. Moreover, feature importance visualization experiments are implemented to seek the key features. Experimental results show that CNNGRN achieved competitive performance on benchmark datasets compared to the state-of-the-art computational methods. Finally, hub genes identified based on CNNGRN have been confirmed to be involved in biological processes through literature.