Measuring phenotype-phenotype similarity through the interactome

Background: Recently, measuring phenotype similarity began to play an important role in disease diagnosis. Researchers have begun to pay attention to develop phenotype similarity measurement. However, existing methods ignore the interactions between phenotype-associated proteins, which may lead to inaccurate phenotype similarity. Results: We proposed a network-based method PhenoNet to calculate the similarity between phenotypes. We localized phenotypes in the network and calculated the similarity between phenotype-associated modules by modeling both the inter- and intra-similarity. Conclusions: PhenoNet was evaluated on two independent evaluation datasets: gene ontology and gene expression data. The result shows that PhenoNet performs better than the state-of-art methods on all evaluation tests.