Protein complex finding and ranking: An application to Alzheimer's disease.

Protein complexes are known to play a major role in controlling cellular activity in a living being. Identifying complexes from raw protein-protein interactions (PPIs) is an important area of research. Earlier work has been limited mostly to yeast and a few other model organisms. Such protein complex identification methods, when applied to large human PPIs often give poor performance. We introduce a novel method called ComFiR to detect such protein complexes and further rank diseased complexes based on a query disease. We have shown that it has better performance in identifying protein complexes from human PPI data. This method is evaluated in terms of positive predictive value, sensitivity and accuracy. We have introduced a ranking approach and showed its application on Alzheimer's disease.