Abstract
The present reproducibility crisis of biological sciences stimulated a vibrant debate about the epistemological foundations of biomedicine. The wide recognition that the crisis stemmed from an acritical (and sometimes dull) application of statistical methods to the experimental results is the basis for re- examine the quantitative approaches to biology. Here we give a proof-of-concept of how the prophetic statements made by Weaver (one of the fathers of mathematical information theory) are coming true in our days, while ‘purely brute-force’ remedies, as Big Data approaches, do not give fully satisfactory remedies to the crisis.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ioannidis, J.P. 2005. Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine 2 (8): e1242.
Nuzzo, R. 2014. Scientific method: Statistical errors. Nature 506 (7487): 150.
Young, S., and A. Kerr. 2011. Deming, data and observational studies a process out of control and needing fixing. Significance 8 (3): 116–120.
Voosen, P. 2015, March 6. Amid a sea of false findings, the NIH tries reform. The Chronicle of Higher education
Munafò, Marcus R., et al. 2017. A manifesto for reproducible science. Nature Human Behaviour 1: 1–0021.
Kraemer, H.C., and D.J. Kupfer. 2006. Size of treatment effects and their importance to clinical research and practice. Biological Psychiatry 59 (11): 990–996.
Richardson, J.T. 1996. Measures of effect size. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 28 (1): 12–22.
Transtrum, M.K., B.B. Machta, K.S. Brown, B.C. Daniels, C.R. Myers, and J.P. Sethna. 2015. Perspective: Sloppiness and emergent theories in physics, biology, and beyond. The Journal of Chemical Physics 143 (1): 07B201_1.
Agresti, A., and C.A. Franklin. 2007. Statistics: The art and science of learning from data. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Pascual, M., and S.A. Levin. 1999. From individuals to population densities: Searching for the intermediate scale of nontrivial determinism. Ecology 80 (7): 2225–2236.
Härdle, W., and L. Simar. 2007. Canonical correlation analysis. In Applied multivariate statistical analysis, 321–330. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer.
Heagerty, P.J., and Y. Zheng. 2005. Survival model predictive accuracy and ROC curves. Biometrics 61 (1): 92–105.
Giuliani, A. 2017. The application of principal component analysis to drug discovery and biomedical data. Drug Discovery Today 22 (7): 1069–1076.
Weaver, W. 1948. Science and complexity. American Scientist 36: 536–549.
Laughlin, R.B., D. Pines, J. Schmalian, B.P. Stojković, and P. Wolynes. 2000. The middle way. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97 (1): 32–37.
Turing, A. M. 2006. Biological sequences and the exact string-matching problem. In Introduction to computational biology. Springer
Todde, V., and A. Giuliani. 2018. Big data. A briefing. Annali dell’Istituto Superiore di Sanità 54 (3): 174–175.
Anderson, C. 2008. The end of theory: The data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete. Wired Magazine 16 (7): 16–07.
Calude, C.S., and G. Longo. 2017. The deluge of spurious correlations in big data. Foundations of Science 22 (3): 595–612.
Gorban, A.N., and I.Y. Tyukin. 2018. Blessing of dimensionality: Mathematical foundations of the statistical physics of data. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A – Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences 376 (2118): 20170237.
Nicosia, V., M. De Domenico, and V. Latora. 2014. Characteristic exponents of complex networks. EPL (Europhysics Letters) 106 (5): 58005.
Di Paola, L., M. De Ruvo, P. Paci, D. Santoni, and A. Giuliani. 2012. Protein contact networks: An emerging paradigm in chemistry. Chemical Reviews 113 (3): 1598–1613.
Hauser, T.U., V.G. Fiore, M. Moutoussis, and R.J. Dolan. 2016. Computational psychiatry of ADHD: Neural gain impairments across many levels of analysis. Trends in Neurosciences 39 (2): 63–73.
Tellegen, B. 1952. A general network theorem with application. Phillips Research Reports 7: 259–269.
Mickulecki, D. 2001. Network thermodynamics and complexity: A transition to relational systems theory. Computers & Chemistry 25: 369–391.
Csermely, P., et al. 2013. Structure and dynamics of molecular networks: A novel paradigm of drug discovery: A comprehensive review. Pharmacology & Therapeutics 138: 333–408.
Kohestani, H., and A. Giuliani. 2016. Organization principles of biological networks: An explorative study. Biosystems 141: 31–39.
Hopkins, A.L. 2008. Network pharmacology: The next paradigm in drug discovery. Nature Chemical Biology 4 (11): 682–690.
Ligeti, B., et al. 2015. A network-based target overlap score for characterizing drug combinations: High correlation with cancer clinical trial results. PLoS One 10 (6): e0129267.
Csermely, P., et al. 2005. The efficiency of multi-target drugs: The network approach might help drug design. Trends in Pharmacological Sciences 26: 178–182.
Overington, J.P., et al. 2006. How many drug targets are there? Nature Reviews. Drug Discovery 5 (12): 993–996.
Huang, S. 2009. Reprogramming cell fates: Reconciling rarity with robustness. BioEssays 31 (5): 546–560.
Pagani, M., et al. 2016. Predicting the transition from normal aging to Alzheimer’s disease: A statistical mechanistic evaluation of FDG-PET data. NeuroImage 141: 282–290.
Prasad, V. 2016. Perspective: The precision-oncology illusion. Nature 537 (7619): S63.
Abrahams, E., and S.L. Eck. 2016. Molecular medicine: Precision oncology is not an illusion. Nature 539 (7629): 357.
Goh, W.W.B., and L. Wong. 2018. Dealing with confounders in omics analysis. Trends in Biotechnology 36 (5): 488–498.
Penny, K.I. 1996. Appropriate critical values when testing for a single multivariate outlier by using the Mahalanobis distance. Applied Statistics 45: 73–81.
De Sanctis, R., A. Viganò, A. Giuliani, A. Gronchi, A. De Paoli, P. Navarria, V. Quagliuolo, A. Santoro, and A. Colosimo. 2018. Unsupervised versus supervised identification of prognostic factors in patients with localized retroperitoneal sarcoma (RPS): a data clustering and the Mahalanobis distance approach. Biomed Research International.
Schwartz, David N. 2017. The last man who knew everything: The Life and times of Enrico Fermi, father of the nuclear age. New York: Hachette.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Giuliani, A., Todde, V. (2020). Big Data, Personalized Medicine and Network Pharmacology: Beyond the Current Paradigms. In: Bizzarri, M. (eds) Approaching Complex Diseases. Human Perspectives in Health Sciences and Technology, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32857-3_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32857-3_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-32856-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-32857-3
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life SciencesBiomedical and Life Sciences (R0)