A comparison of approximation techniques for variance-based sensitivity analysis of biochemical reaction systems

Background: Sensitivity analysis is an indispensable tool for the analysis of complex systems. In a recent paper, we have introduced a thermodynamically consistent variance-based sensitivity analysis approach for studying the robustness and fragility properties of biochemical reaction systems under uncertainty in the standard chemical potentials of the activated complexes of the reactions and the standard chemical potentials of the molecular species. In that approach, key sensitivity indices were estimated by Monte Carlo sampling, which is computationally very demanding and impractical for large biochemical reaction systems. Computationally efficient algorithms are needed to make variance-based sensitivity analysis applicable to realistic cellular networks, modeled by biochemical reaction systems that consist of a large number of reactions and molecular species. Results: We present four techniques, derivative approximation (DA), polynomial approximation (PA), Gauss-Hermite integration...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Hong-Xuan Zhang, John Goutsias
• Keywords: Biochemical Reaction Systems, BMCBI 2010, Sensitivity Analysis, Variance-based Sensitivity