Abstract
When modeling complex biological systems, exploring parameter space is critical, because parameter values are typically poorly known a priori. This exploration can be challenging, because parameter space often has high dimension and complex structure. Recent work, however, has revealed universal structure in parameter space of models for nonlinear systems. In particular, models are often sloppy, with strong parameter correlations and an exponential range of parameter sensitivities. Here we review the evidence for universal sloppiness and its implications for parameter fitting, model prediction, and experimental design. In principle, one can transform parameters to alleviate sloppiness, but a parameterization-independent information geometry perspective reveals deeper universal structure. We thus also review the recent insights offered by information geometry, particularly in regard to sloppiness and numerical methods.
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Notes
- 1.
Concurrent with Brown and Sethna’s work, Rand et al. independently noted an exponential spacing of eigenvalues for several circadian clock models, although Rand et al. focused their analysis on the stiffest few eigenvalues [57].
- 2.
A log-normal prior that bounds a parameter \(\theta \) to be, with \(\approx \)95 % confidence, between \(\theta _0/F\) and \(\theta _0 \times F\) corresponds to an additional residual in the cost function (Eq. 11.1) of \(r = (\log \theta - \log \theta _0) / \log \sqrt{F}\). Such a residual adds \(1/(\log \sqrt{F})^2\) to the diagonal elements of the Hessian matrix, bounding the eigenvalues from below. In our case, \(F = 10^3\), so the eigenvalues must be greater than \(\approx \)0.084.
- 3.
Note that this PCA was done on points sampled uniformly in parameter space, not data space, and this non-uniformity may bias the resulting eigenvalue summary of the model manifold. We expect, however, that this approach provides a good first approximation to the hierarchy of manifold widths that would be found by geodesics.
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Acknowledgments
B.M. was supported by an ARCS Foundation Fellowship. A.R. was supported by NSF IGERT grant DGE-0654435. R.G. was supported by NSF grant DEB-1146074. We thank Alec Coffman for helpful discussions. R.G. and M.T. particularly thank Jim Sethna for his outstanding support and mentorship.
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Mannakee, B.K., Ragsdale, A.P., Transtrum, M.K., Gutenkunst, R.N. (2016). Sloppiness and the Geometry of Parameter Space. In: Geris, L., Gomez-Cabrero, D. (eds) Uncertainty in Biology. Studies in Mechanobiology, Tissue Engineering and Biomaterials, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21296-8_11
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