Wasserstein Distances for Estimating Parameters in Stochastic Reaction Networks

Modern experimental methods such as flow cytometry and fluorescence in-situ hybridization (FISH) allow the measurement of cell-by-cell molecule numbers for RNA, proteins and other substances for large numbers of cells at a time, opening up new possibilities for the quantitative analysis of biological systems. Of particular interest is the study of biological reaction systems describing processes such as gene expression, cellular signalling and metabolism on a molecular level. It is well established that many of these processes are inherently stochastic [1‐3] and that deterministic approaches to their study can fail to capture properties essential for our understanding of these systems [4, 5]. Despite recent technological and conceptual advances, modelling and inference for stochastic models of reaction networks remains challenging due to additional complexities not present in the deterministic case. The Chemical Master Equation (CME) [6] in particular, while frequently used to model many types of reaction networks, is difficult to solve exactly, and parameter inference in practice often relies on a variety of approximation schemes whose accuracy can vary widely and unpredictably depending on the context [6‐8].