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Optimisation and landscape analysis of computational biology models: a case study

Published: 15 July 2017 Publication History

Abstract

The parameter explosion problem is a crucial bottleneck in modelling gene regulatory networks (GRNs), limiting the size of models that can be optimised to experimental data. By discretising state, but not time, Boolean delay equations (BDEs) provide a significant reduction in parameter numbers, whilst still providing dynamical complexity comparable to more biochemically detailed models, such as those based on differential equations. Here, we explore several approaches to optimising BDEs to timeseries data, using a simple circadian clock model as a case study. We compare the effectiveness of two optimisers on our problem: a genetic algorithm (GA) and an elite accumulative sampling (EAS) algorithm that provides robustness to data discretisation. Our results show that both methods are able to distinguish effectively between alternative architectures, yielding excellent fits to data. We also perform a landscape analysis, providing insights into the properties that determine optimiser performance (e.g. number of local optima and basin sizes). Our results provide a promising platform for the analysis of more complex GRNs, and suggest the possibility of leveraging cost landscapes to devise more efficient optimisation schemes.

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cover image ACM Conferences
GECCO '17: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion
July 2017
1934 pages
ISBN:9781450349390
DOI:10.1145/3067695
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Published: 15 July 2017

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Author Tags

  1. boolean delay equations
  2. landscape analysis
  3. optimisation
  4. systems biology

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  • University of Exeter HPC Strategy
  • Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

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