Spectral algorithms for heterogeneous biological networks

Spectral methods, which use information relating to eigenvectors, singular vectors and generalized singular vectors, help us to visualize and summarize sets of pairwise interactions. In this work, we motivate and discuss the use of spectral methods by taking a matrix computation view and applying concepts from applied linear algebra. We show that this unified approach is sufficiently flexible to allow multiple sources of network information to be combined. We illustrate the methods on microarray data arising from a large population-based study in human adipose tissue, combined with related information concerning metabolic pathways.