Quantitative Life Sciences Guest Seminar - Thursday 17 November at 11:00

[Quantitative Life Sciences]

Quantitative Life Sciences Guest Seminar

Thursday 17 November at 11:00
ICTP, Central Area, 2nd floor, old SISSA building

" Cox-process representation and inference for stochastic 
reaction-diffusion processes "

Guido Sanguinetti - School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Abstract:
Complex behaviour in many systems arises from the stochastic 
interactions of spatially distributed particles or agents. Stochastic 
reaction-diffusion processes are widely used to model such behaviour in 
disciplines ranging from biology to the social sciences, yet they are 
notoriously difficult to simulate and calibrate to observational data. 
On the other hand, spatio-temporal point processes offer several 
computational advantages from the statistical perspective, and can be 
coupled to dynamics via an evolving intensity f! ield. In this talk, I 
will discuss how joint time marginals of a stochastic reaction-diffusion 
process can be approximated in a mean-field sense by a spatio-temporal 
Cox process. The resulting approximation allows us to naturally define 
an approximate likelihood, which can be optimised with respect to the 
kinetic parameters of the model. We show on several examples from 
systems biology and epidemiology that the method yields consistently 
accurate parameter estimates, and can be used effectively for model 
selection.

Web page: http://indico.ictp.it/event/8058/

-- 
Erica Sarnataro
Group Secretary
Quantitative Life Sciences
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
Trieste,  Italy
Tel. +39-040-2240623
e-mail: qls at ictp.it