biRte: Bayesian inference of context-specific regulator activities and transcriptional networks

In the last years there has been an increasing effort to computationally model and predict the influence of regulators (transcription factors, miRNAs) on gene expression. Here we introduce biRte as a computationally attractive approach combining Bayesian inference of regulator activities with network reverse engineering. biRte integrates target gene predictions with different omics data entities (e.g. miRNA and mRNA data) into a joint probabilistic framework. The utility of our method is tested in extensive simulation studies and demonstrated with applications from prostate cancer and Escherichia coli growth control. The resulting regulatory networks generally show a good agreement with the biological literature.