Bounds on the average sensitivity of nested canalizing functions.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 23741321.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0064371 and PMC identifier 3669309.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Nested canalizing Boolean functions (NCF) play an important role in biologically motivated regulatory networks and in signal processing, in particular describing stack filters. It has been conjectured that NCFs have a stabilizing effect on the network dynamics. It is well known that the average sensitivity plays a central role for the stability of (random) Boolean networks. Here we provide a tight upper bound on the average sensitivity of NCFs as a function of the number of relevant input variables. As conjectured in literature this bound is smaller than 4/3. This shows that a large number of functions appearing in biological networks belong to a class that has low average sensitivity, which is even close to a tight lower bound.
Medical subject headings
- Fourier Analysis
- Gene Regulatory Networks
- Models, Statistical