DM-MOGA: a multi-objective optimization genetic algorithm for identifying disease modules of non-small cell lung cancer

BACKGROUND: Constructing molecular interaction networks from microarray data and then identifying disease module biomarkers can provide insight into the underlying pathogenic mechanisms of non-small cell lung cancer. A promising approach for identifying disease modules in the network is community detection. RESULTS: In order to identify disease modules from gene co-expression networks, a community detection method is proposed based on multi-objective optimization genetic algorithm with decomposition. The method is named DM-MOGA and possesses two highlights. First, the boundary correction strategy is designed for the modules obtained in the process of local module detection and pre-simplification. Second, during the evolution, we introduce Davies–Bouldin index and clustering coefficient as fitness functions which are improved and migrated to weighted networks. In order to identify modules that are more relevant to diseases, the above strategies are designed to consider the network topology of genes and the strength of connections with other genes at the same time. Experimental results of different gene expression datasets of non-small cell lung cancer demonstrate that the core modules obtained by DM-MOGA are more effective than those obtained by several other advanced module identification methods. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed method identifies disease-relevant modules by optimizing two novel fitness functions to simultaneously consider the local topology of each gene and its connection strength with other genes. The association of the identified core modules with lung cancer has been confirmed by pathway and gene ontology enrichment analysis. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12859-023-05136-z.