Comparative analysis of module-based versus direct methods for reverse-engineering transcriptional regulatory networks

Abstract
A myriad of methods to reverse-engineer transcriptional regulatory networks have been developed in recent years. Direct methods directly reconstruct a network of pairwise regulatory interactions while module-based methods predict a set of regulators for modules of coexpressed genes treated as a single unit. To date, there has been no systematic comparison of the relative strengths and weaknesses of both types of methods.