The impossible challenge of estimating non-existent moments of the Chemical Master Equation

MOTIVATION: The Chemical Master Equation (CME) is a set of linear differential equations that describes the evolution of the probability distribution on all possible configurations of a (bio-)chemical reaction system. Since the number of configurations and therefore the dimension of the CME rapidly increases with the number of molecules, its applicability is restricted to small systems. A widely applied remedy for this challenge is moment-based approaches which consider the evolution of the first few moments of the distribution as summary statistics for the complete distribution. Here, we investigate the performance of two moment-estimation methods for reaction systems whose equilibrium distributions encounter fat-tailedness and do not possess statistical moments. RESULTS: We show that estimation via stochastic simulation algorithm (SSA) trajectories lose consistency over time and estimated moment values span a wide range of values even for large sample sizes. In comparison, the method of moments returns smooth moment estimates but is not able to indicate the non-existence of the allegedly predicted moments. We furthermore analyze the negative effect of a CME solution’s fat-tailedness on SSA run times and explain inherent difficulties. While moment-estimation techniques are a commonly applied tool in the simulation of (bio-)chemical reaction networks, we conclude that they should be used with care, as neither the system definition nor the moment-estimation techniques themselves reliably indicate the potential fat-tailedness of the CME’s solution.