Kevin Kontos, Ph.D.

As a member of the Machine Learning Group from October 2004 until December 2008, I focused my research on Gaussian graphical model selection and its application to bioinformatics. This research was part of a multidisciplinary project for which I was awarded a four-year research grant from the University of Brussels (ULB).

I was awarded the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science on July 2nd, 2009, for my thesis entitled Gaussian Graphical Model Selection for Gene Regulatory Network Reverse Engineering and Function Prediction.

Selected publications

  • Gaussian Graphical Model Selection for Gene Regulatory Network Reverse Engineering and Function Prediction. Ph.D. thesis in Computer Science. University of Brussels (ULB). July 2009.

  • K. Kontos and G. Bontempi (2009) Estimation of Large-Dimensional Covariance Matrices: Improving upon the Shrinkage Estimator. Proceedings of the 24th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (ACM SAC 2009).

  • K. Kontos, B. André, J. van Helden and G. Bontempi (2009) Gaussian Graphical Models to Infer Putative Genes Involved in Nitrogen Catabolite Repression in the Yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning and Data Mining in Bioinformatics (EvoBIO 2009), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 5483, 13-24.

  • K. Kontos and G. Bontempi (2008) Nested q-Partial Graphs for Genetic Network Inference from "Small n, Large p" Microarray Data. In Elloumi, M., Küng, J., Linial, M., Murphy, R., Schneider, K., and Toma, C., editors, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Bioinformatics Research and Development (BIRD 2008), Communications in Computer and Information Science, Vol. 13, 273-287, Springer.

  • K. Kontos, P. Godard, B. André, J. van Helden and G. Bontempi (2008) Machine Learning Techniques to Identify Putative Genes Involved in Nitrogen Catabolite Repression in the Yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. BMC Proceedings 2008, 2(Suppl 4):S5.

  • P. E. Meyer, K. Kontos, F. Lafitte and G. Bontempi (2007) Information-Theoretic Inference of Large Transcriptional Regulatory Networks. EURASIP Journal on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, Vol. 2007, Article ID 79879, 9 pages.

  • P. Godard, A. Urrestarazu, S. Vissers, K. Kontos, G. Bontempi, J. van Helden and Bruno André (2007) Effect of 21 Different Nitrogen Sources on Global Gene Expression in the Yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Molecular and Cellular Biology, Vol. 27, No. 8, 3065-3086.

  • P. E. Meyer, K. Kontos and G. Bontempi (2007) Biological network inference using redundancy analysis. In S. Hochreiter and R. Wagner (Eds), Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Bioinformatics Research and Development (BIRD 2007), Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, Vol. 4414, 916-927, Springer.