Network Biology Empowering Detection and Understanding of Interactions Between Genetic Factors in Development of Complex Phenotypes

Following the success of genome-wide association studies, it is now important to unravel interactions between genes as well as between genes and environment. Here we discuss how to interpret higher order statistical interactions in terms of underlying biological processes purportedly generating such dependencies. In this chapter, we specifically review how biological networks, such as those generated from systems biological approaches, could possibly facilitate the interpretation of observed interactions in the development of complex phenotypes, e.g., complex diseases. We conclude that the statistical challenge is essentially a high-dimensional feature selection problem and there is therefore a need to construct intelligent priors using biological networks as a tool for the discovery and interpretation of interactions.