Abstract

Biological networks play a significant role in addressing biological problems. Random walk model is a highly efficient way to study networkswhich has been widely used in solving biological problems based on networks. In this work, those biological problems are classified into four categories, ranking nodes in biological networks, measuring similarity or distance between nodes in biological networks, detecting models from biological networks and finding interrelationship between nodes from different biological networks. After that, we survey the recent advance in applications of random walk models to solve these types of problems on the basis of biological networks.

Keywords: Biological networks, essential proteins, disease genes, protein functions, protein complexes, random walk model.

Graphical Abstract