Dizzy-Beats: a Bayesian evidence analysis tool for systems biology

Motivation: Model selection and parameter inference are complex problems of long-standing interest in systems biology. Selecting between competing models arises commonly as underlying biochemical mechanisms are often not fully known, hence alternative models must be considered. Parameter inference yields important information on the extent to which the data and the model constrain parameter values. Results: We report Dizzy-Beats, a graphical Java Bayesian evidence analysis tool implementing nested sampling - an algorithm yielding an estimate of the log of the Bayesian evidence Z and the moments of model parameters, thus addressing two outstanding challenges in systems modelling. A likelihood function based on the L(1)-norm is adopted as it is generically applicable to replicated time series data. Availability and implementation: http://sourceforge.net/p/bayesevidence/home/Home/ Contact: s.aitken@ed.ac.uk