eprintid: 3765 rev_number: 11 eprint_status: archive userid: 6 dir: disk0/00/00/37/65 datestamp: 2017-09-26 09:19:39 lastmod: 2017-09-26 09:19:39 status_changed: 2017-09-26 09:19:39 type: book_section metadata_visibility: show creators_name: Tognazzi, Stefano creators_name: Tribastone, Mirco creators_name: Tschaikowski, Max creators_name: Vandin, Andrea creators_id: creators_id: mirco.tribastone@imtlucca.it creators_id: max.tschaikowski@imtlucca.it creators_id: andrea.vandin@imtlucca.it title: EGAC: a genetic algorithm to compare chemical reaction networks ispublished: pub subjects: QA75 divisions: CSA full_text_status: public pres_type: paper keywords: Chemical Reaction Networks; Ordinary Differential Equations; Model Comparison abstract: Discovering relations between chemical reaction networks (CRNs) is a relevant problem in computational systems biology for model reduction, to explain if a given system can be seen as an abstraction of another one; and for model comparison, useful to establish an evolutionary path from simpler networks to more complex ones. This is also related to foundational issues in computer science regarding program equivalence, in light of the established interpretation of a CRN as a kernel programming language for concurrency. Criteria for deciding if two CRNs can be formally related have been recently developed, but these require that a candidate mapping be provided. Automatically finding candidate mappings is very hard in general since the search space essentially consists of all possible partitions of a set. In this paper we tackle this problem by developing a genetic algorithm for a class of CRNs called influence networks, which can be used to model a variety of biological systems including cell-cycle switches and gene networks. An extensive numerical evaluation shows that our approach can successfully establish relations between influence networks from the literature which cannot be found by exact algorithms due to their large computational requirements. date: 2017 date_type: published publisher: ACM pagerange: 833-840 event_title: GECCO '17: the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference event_location: Berlin (Germany) event_dates: July 15th-19th 2017 event_type: conference id_number: doi:10.1145/3071178.3071265 refereed: TRUE isbn: 978-1-4503-4920-8 book_title: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference on - GECCO '17 official_url: http://doi.org/10.1145/3071178.3071265 citation: Tognazzi, Stefano and Tribastone, Mirco and Tschaikowski, Max and Vandin, Andrea EGAC: a genetic algorithm to compare chemical reaction networks. In: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference on - GECCO '17. ACM, pp. 833-840. ISBN 978-1-4503-4920-8 (2017) document_url: http://eprints.imtlucca.it/3765/1/gecco2017.pdf