What is a reasonable degree value for a node in a network to be considered a hub gene? Are there other criteria aside from degree that one should take note of when identifying hub genes? Thanks.
Hub is a common characteristic of the scale-free networks (social network, PPI network, etc). Its threshold (if there is one) should be related to the whole network itself (such as average “hubness”), not defined independently.
Hub is closely associated with centrality measure. There are many different centrality measures (see here for an excellent intro). NetworkAnalyst offers degree and betweenness centrality at the moment.
1 Like
Thanks. What would you suggest is better to use; degree or betweenness? I have read in one article that they used a cut-off of >/= 10 to consider a node a hub. What do you think?