To respect the nature of discrete parts in a system, stochastic simulation algorithms (SSAs) must update for each action (i) all part counts and (ii) each action's probability of occurring next and its timing. This makes it expensive to simulate biological networks with well-connected "hubs" such as ATP that affect many actions. Temperature and volume also affect many actions and may be changed significantly in small steps by the network itself during fever and cell growth, respectively. Such trends matter for evolutionary questions, as cell volume determines doubling times and fever may affect survival, both key traits for biological evolution. Yet simulations often ignore such trends and assume constant environments to avoid many costly probability updates. Such computational convenience precludes analyses of important aspects of evolution. Here we present "Lazy Updating," an add-on for SSAs designed to reduce the cost of simulating hubs. When a hub changes, Lazy Updating postpones all probability updates for reactions depending on this hub, until a threshold is crossed. Speedup is substantial if most computing time is spent on such updates. We implemented Lazy Updating for the Sorting Direct Method and it is easily integrated into other SSAs such as Gillespie's Direct Method or the Next Reaction Method. Testing on several toy models and a cellular metabolism model showed >10× faster simulations for its use-cases-with a small loss of accuracy. Thus we see Lazy Updating as a valuable tool for some special but important simulation problems that are difficult to address efficiently otherwise. © 2014 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Reaction networks are often used to model interacting species in fields such as biochemistry and ecology. When the counts of the species are sufficiently large, the dynamics of their concentrations are typically modeled via a system of differential equations. However, when the counts of some species are small, the dynamics of the counts are typically modeled stochastically via a discrete state, continuous time Markov chain.A key quantity of interest for such models is the probability mass function of the process at some fixed time. Since paths of such models are relatively straightforward to simulate, we can estimate the probabilities by constructing an empirical distribution. However, the support of the distribution is often diffuse across a high-dimensional state space, where the dimension is equal to the number of species. Therefore generating an accurate empirical distribution can come with a large computational cost.We present a new Monte Carlo estimator that fundamentally improves on the "classical" Monte Carlo estimator described above. It also preserves much of classical Monte Carlo's simplicity. The idea is basically one of conditional Monte Carlo. Our conditional Monte Carlo estimator has two parameters, and their choice critically affects the performance of the algorithm. Hence, a key contribution of the present work is that we demonstrate how to approximate optimal values for these parameters in an efficient manner. Moreover, we provide a central limit theorem for our estimator, which leads to approximate confidence intervals for its error.
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