Learning mixed graphical models with separate sparsity parameters and stability-based model selection.

Background: Mixed graphical models (MGMs) are graphical models learned over a combination of continuous and discrete variables. Mixed variable types are common in biomedical datasets. MGMs consist of a parameterized joint probability density, which implies a network structure over these heterogeneous variables.

Unbiased Rare Event Sampling in Spatial Stochastic Systems Biology Models Using a Weighted Ensemble of Trajectories.

The long-term goal of connecting scales in biological simulation can be facilitated by scale-agnostic methods. We demonstrate that the weighted ensemble (WE) strategy, initially developed for molecular simulations, applies effectively to spatially resolved cell-scale simulations. The WE approach runs an ensemble of parallel trajectories with assigned weights and uses a statistical resampling strategy of replicating and pruning trajectories to focus computational effort on difficult-to-sample regions.

Efficient stochastic simulation of chemical kinetics networks using a weighted ensemble of trajectories.

We apply the "weighted ensemble" (WE) simulation strategy, previously employed in the context of molecular dynamics simulations, to a series of systems-biology models that range in complexity from a one-dimensional system to a system with 354 species and 3680 reactions. WE is relatively easy to implement, does not require extensive hand-tuning of parameters, does not depend on the details of the simulation algorithm, and can facilitate the simulation of extremely rare events. For the coupled stochastic reaction systems we study, WE is able to produce accurate and efficient approximations of the joint probability distribution for all chemical species for all time t.