Articles

Regularized EM algorithm for sparse parameter estimation in nonlinear dynamic systems with application to gene regulatory network inference

Jia, Bin; Wang, Xiaodong

Parameter estimation in dynamic systems finds applications in various disciplines, including system biology. The well-known expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is a popular method and has been widely used to solve system identification and parameter estimation problems. However, the conventional EM algorithm cannot exploit the sparsity. On the other hand, in gene regulatory network inference problems, the parameters to be estimated often exhibit sparse structure. In this paper, a regularized expectation-maximization (rEM) algorithm for sparse parameter estimation in nonlinear dynamic systems is proposed that is based on the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation and can incorporate the sparse prior. The expectation step involves the forward Gaussian approximation filtering and the backward Gaussian approximation smoothing. The maximization step employs a re-weighted iterative thresholding method. The proposed algorithm is then applied to gene regulatory network inference. Results based on both synthetic and real data show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

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Title
EURASIP Journal on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/1687-4153-2014-5

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Academic Units
Electrical Engineering
Published Here
September 23, 2014