Evidence map›Paper›PMID 36303798›Full record

ArticleFrontiers in bioinformatics2021

Machine Learning for Causal Inference in Biological Networks: Perspectives of This Challenge.

Paola Lecca

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Frontiers in bioinformatics, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
20citing papers in PubMed, 1 pooled it
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

20 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.

  1. Pooled it
  2. Article
  3. Review
  4. Article
  5. Review
  6. Review
  7. Machine Learning-Enhanced Nanoparticle Design for Precision Cancer Drug Delivery.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025
    Review
  8. Review
  9. Article
  10. Article
  11. Article
  12. Gene regulatory networks in disease and ageing.Nature reviews. Nephrology · 2024
    Review
  13. Article
  14. Article
  15. Article
  16. Artificial intelligence for dementia prevention.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2023
    Review
  17. What is circulating factor disease and how is it currently explained?Pediatric nephrology (Berlin, Germany) · 2023
    Review
  18. Article
  19. Review
  20. An introduction to causal inference for pharmacometricians.CPT: pharmacometrics & systems pharmacology · 2023
    Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

1 author.

Paola LeccaFaculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Piazza Domenicani, Bolzano, Italy.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Most machine learning-based methods predict outcomes rather than understanding causality. Machine learning methods have been proved to be efficient in finding correlations in data, but unskilful to determine causation. This issue severely limits the applicability of machine learning methods to infer the causal relationships between the entities of a biological network, and more in general of any dynamical system, such as medical intervention strategies and clinical outcomes system, that is representable as a network. From the perspective of those who want to use the results of network inference not only to understand the mechanisms underlying the dynamics, but also to understand how the network reacts to external stimuli (e. g. environmental factors, therapeutic treatments), tools that can understand the causal relationships between data are highly demanded. Given the increasing popularity of machine learning techniques in computational biology and the recent literature proposing the use of machine learning techniques for the inference of biological networks, we would like to present the challenges that mathematics and computer science research faces in generalising machine learning to an approach capable of understanding causal relationships, and the prospects that achieving this will open up for the medical application domains of systems biology, the main paradigm of which is precisely network biology at any physical scale.

Indexed as

artificial intelligencecausalitycausal thinkingdeep learninginferencemachine learningsystems biology

Identifiers

PMID36303798
PMCPMC9581010

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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.