Title
Using Emulation to Engineer and Understand Simulations of Biological Systems.
Abstract
Modeling and simulation techniques have demonstrated success in studying biological systems. As the drive to better capture biological complexity leads to more sophisticated simulators, it becomes challenging to perform statistical analyses that help translate predictions into increased understanding. These analyses may require repeated executions and extensive sampling of high-dimensional parameter spaces: analyses that may become intractable due to time and resource limitations. Significant reduction in these requirements can be obtained using surrogate models, or emulators, that can rapidly and accurately predict the output of an existing simulator. We apply emulation to evaluate and enrich understanding of a previously published agent-based simulator of lymphoid tissue organogenesis, showing an ensemble of machine learning techniques can reproduce results obtained using a suite of statistical analyses within seconds. This performance improvement permits incorporation of previously intractable analyses, including multi-objective optimization to obtain parameter sets that yield a desired response, and Approximate Bayesian Computation to assess parametric uncertainty. To facilitate exploitation of emulation in simulation-focused studies, we extend our open source statistical package, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">spartan</italic> , to provide a suite of tools for emulator development, validation, and application. Overcoming resource limitations permits enriched evaluation and refinement, easing translation of simulator insights into increased biological understanding.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TCBB.2018.2843339
IEEE/ACM transactions on computational biology and bioinformatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Biological system modeling,Computational modeling,Analytical models,Biological systems,Uncertainty,Emulation,Machine learning
Spartan,Approximate Bayesian computation,Suite,Modeling and simulation,Computer science,Emulation,Parametric statistics,Sampling (statistics),Artificial intelligence,Machine learning,Performance improvement
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
17
1
1545-5963
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kieran Alden1123.37
Jason Cosgrove200.34
Mark Coles392.72
Jon Timmis41237120.32