TopoFilter: a MATLAB package for mechanistic model identification in systems biology

BACKGROUND: To develop mechanistic dynamic models in systems biology, one often needs to identify all (or minimal) representations of the biological processes that are consistent with experimental data, out of a potentially large set of hypothetical mechanisms. However, a simple enumeration of all alternatives becomes quickly intractable when the number of model parameters grows. Selecting appropriate dynamic models out of a large ensemble of models, taking the uncertainty in our biological knowledge and in the experimental data into account, is therefore a key current problem in systems biology. RESULTS: The TopoFilter package addresses this problem in a heuristic and automated fashion by implementing the previously described topological filtering method for Bayesian model selection. It includes a core heuristic for searching the space of submodels of a parametrized model, coupled with a sampling-based exploration of the parameter space. Recent developments of the method allow to balance exhaustiveness and speed of the model space search, to efficiently re-sample parameters, to parallelize the search, and to use custom scoring functions. We use a theoretical example to motivate these features and then demonstrate TopoFilter’s applicability for a yeast signaling network with more than 250’000 possible model structures. CONCLUSIONS: TopoFilter is a flexible software framework that makes Bayesian model selection and reduction efficient and scalable to network models of a complexity that represents contemporary problems in, for example, cell signaling. TopoFilter is open-source, available under the GPL-3.0 license at https://gitlab.com/csb.ethz/TopoFilter. It includes installation instructions, a quickstart guide, a description of all package options, and multiple examples.