One physicist’s experience trying to model the EGF signaling pathway with a 48-parameter ODE model
Cerione explained that none of the parameters are known to better than a factor of between two and ten, and that it was so boring to measure them that he couldn’t pay anyone to do so. The model has 48 total parameters!…
We could fit to the data and make predictions, but with 48 free parameters could we trust our answers? To see if an answer was trustworthy, we did statistical mechanics in model space. (Doing a Monte Carlo in parameter space, it turns out, is called stochastic Bayesian analysis.) As I had suspected, the parameters varied over huge ranges. In fact, every parameter varied by over a factor of fifty, and many varied over factors of many thousands. Remember – all of these parameter sets still fit the existing experimental data.
Check out Cornell physicist James Sethna’s page on ‘sloppy models’, where he explains how to deal with biological systems that have dozens of parameters, most of which, thank God, don’t actually matter.
The Finch and Pea 