Comparison of regmed and BayesNetty for exploring causal models with many variables

Here we compare a recently proposed method and software package, regmed, with our own previously developed package, BayesNetty, designed to allow exploratory analysis of complex causal relationships between biological variables. We find that regmed generally has poorer recall but much better precision than BayesNetty. This is perhaps not too surprising as regmed is specifically designed for use with high-dimensional data. BayesNetty is found to be more sensitive to the resulting multiple testing problem encountered in these circumstances. However, as regmed is not designed to handle missing data, its performance is severely affected when missing data is present, whereas the performance of BayesNetty is only slightly affected. The performance of regmed can be rescued in this situation by first using BayesNetty to impute the missing data, and then applying regmed to the resulting “filled-in” data set.