Data-Informed Parameter Synthesis for Population Markov Chains

Abstract

Population models are widely used to model different phenomena: animal collectives such as social insects, flocking birds, schooling fish, or humans within societies, as well as molecular species inside a cell, cells forming a tissue. Animal collectives show remarkable self-organisation towards emergent behaviours without centralised control. Quantitative models of the underlying mechanisms can directly serve important societal concerns (for example, prediction of seismic activity [5]), inspire the design of distributed algorithms (for example, ant colony algorithm [1]), or aid robust design and engineering of collective, adaptive systems under given functionality and resources, which is recently gaining attention in vision of smart cities [3, 4]. Quantitative prediction of the behaviour of a population of agents over time and space, each having several behavioural modes, results in a high-dimensional, non-linear, and stochastic system [2]. Hence, computational modelling with population models is challenging, especially when the model parameters are unknown and experiments are expensive.