Inverse Problems in Systems Biology: A Critical Review

Systems Biology may be assimilated to a symbiotic cyclic interplaying between the forward and inverse problems. Computational models need to be continuously refined through experiments and in turn they help us to make limited experimental resources more efficient. Every time one does an experiment we know that there will be some noise that can disrupt our measurements. Despite the noise certainly is a problem, the inverse problems already involve the inference of missing information, even if the data is entirely reliable. So the addition of a certain limited noise does not fundamentally change the situation but can be used to solve the so-called ill-posed problem, as defined by Hadamard. It can be seen as an extra source of information. Recent studies have shown that complex systems, among others the systems biology, are poorly constrained and ill-conditioned because it is difficult to use experimental data to fully estimate their parameters. For these reasons was born the concept of sloppy models, a sequence of models of increasing complexity that become sloppy in the limit of microscopic accuracy. Furthermore the concept of sloppy models contains also the concept of un-identifiability, because the models are characterized by many parameters that are poorly constrained by experimental data. Then a strategy needs to be designed to infer, analyze, and understand biological systems. The aim of this work is to provide a critical review to the inverse problems in systems biology defining a strategy to determine the minimal set of information needed to overcome the problems arising from dynamic biological models that generally may have many unknown, non-measurable parameters.