Bayesian parameter inference by Markov chain Monte Carlo with hybrid fitness measures: theory and test in apoptosis signal transduction network

When model parameters in systems biology are not available from experiments, they need to be inferred so that the resulting simulation reproduces the experimentally known phenomena. For the purpose, Bayesian statistics with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a useful method. Conventional MCMC needs likelihood to evaluate a posterior distribution of acceptable parameters, while the approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) MCMC evaluates posterior distribution with use of qualitative fitness measure. However, none of these algorithms can deal with mixture of quantitative, i.e., likelihood, and qualitative fitness measures simultaneously. Here, to deal with this mixture, we formulated Bayesian formula for hybrid fitness measures (HFM). Then we implemented it to MCMC (MCMC-HFM). We tested MCMC-HFM first for a kinetic toy model with a positive feedback. Inferring kinetic parameters mainly related to the positive feedback, we found that MCMC-HFM reliably infer them using both qualitative and quantitative fitness measures. Then, we applied the MCMC-HFM to an apoptosis signal transduction network previously proposed. For kinetic parameters related to implicit positive feedbacks, which are important for bistability and irreversibility of the output, the MCMC-HFM reliably inferred these kinetic parameters. In particular, some kinetic parameters that have experimental estimates were inferred without using these data and the results were consistent with experiments. Moreover, for some parameters, the mixed use of quantitative and qualitative fitness measures narrowed down the acceptable range of parameters.