The rationale behind correlation network methodology is to use network language to describe the pairwise relationships (correlations) between the rows of X (Equation 1). Although other statistical techniques exist for analyzing correlation matrices, network language is particularly intuitive to biologists and allows for simple social network analogies. Correlation networks can be used to address many analysis goals including the following. First, correlation networks can be used to find clusters (modules) of interconnected nodes. Thus, a network module is a set of rows of X (Equation 1) which are closely connected according to a suitably defined measure of interconnectedness.
