Parameter estimation methods for gene circuit modeling from time-series mRNA data: A comparative study

Abstract

Parameter estimation is a challenging computational problemin the reverse engineering of biological systems. Because advances in biotechnology have facilitated wide availability of time-series gene expression data, systematic parameter esti- mation of gene circuitmodels fromsuch time-series mRNA data has become an importantmethod for quantitatively dissecting the regulation of gene expression. By focusing on themodeling of gene circuits, we examine here the perform- ance of three types of state-of-the-art parameter estimation methods: population-basedmethods, onlinemethods and model-decomposition-basedmethods. Our results show that certain population-basedmethods are able to generate high- quality parameter solutions. The performance of thesemethods, however, is heavily dependent on the size of the param- eter search space, and their computational requirements substantially increase as the size of the search space increases. In comparison, onlinemethods andmodel decomposition-basedmethods are computationally faster alternatives and are less dependent on the size of the search space. Among other things, our results show that a hybrid approach that augments computationally fastmethods with local search as a subsequent refinement procedure can substantially increase the qual- ity of their parameter estimates to the level on par with the best solution obtained fromthe population-basedmethods whilemaintaining high computational speed. These suggest that such hybridmethods can be a promising alternative to themore commonly used population-basedmethods for parameter estimation of gene circuit models when limited prior knowledge about the underlying regulatorymechanismsmakes the size of the parameter search space vastly large.