SSRCA: a novel machine learning pipeline to perform sensitivity analysis for agent-based models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Rohr, Edward H., Nardini, John T.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Rohr, Edward H.
Nardini, John T.
author_facet Rohr, Edward H.
Nardini, John T.
contents Agent-based models (ABMs) are widely used in biology to understand how individual actions scale into emergent population behavior. Modelers employ sensitivity analysis (SA) algorithms to quantify input parameters' impact on model outputs, however, it is hard to perform SA for ABMs due to their computational and complex nature. In this work, we develop the Simulate, Summarize, Reduce, Cluster, and Analyze (SSRCA) methodology, a machine-learning based pipeline designed to facilitate SA for ABMs. In particular, SSRCA can achieve the following tasks for ABMS: 1) identify sensitive model parameters, 2) reveal common output model patterns, and 3) determine which input parameter values generate these patterns. We use an example ABM of tumor spheroid growth to showcase how SSRCA identifies four common patterns from the ABM and the parameter regions that generate these outputs. Additionally, we compare the SA results between SSRCA and the popular Sobol' Method and find that SSRCA's identified sensitive parameters are robust to the choice of model descriptors while Sobol's are not. This analysis could streamline data-driven tasks, such as parameter estimation, for ABMs by reducing parameter space. While we highlight these results with an ABM on tumor spheroid formation, the SSRCA Methodology is broadly applicable to biological ABMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_00168
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SSRCA: a novel machine learning pipeline to perform sensitivity analysis for agent-based models
Rohr, Edward H.
Nardini, John T.
Quantitative Methods
Cell Behavior
Machine Learning
Agent-based models (ABMs) are widely used in biology to understand how individual actions scale into emergent population behavior. Modelers employ sensitivity analysis (SA) algorithms to quantify input parameters' impact on model outputs, however, it is hard to perform SA for ABMs due to their computational and complex nature. In this work, we develop the Simulate, Summarize, Reduce, Cluster, and Analyze (SSRCA) methodology, a machine-learning based pipeline designed to facilitate SA for ABMs. In particular, SSRCA can achieve the following tasks for ABMS: 1) identify sensitive model parameters, 2) reveal common output model patterns, and 3) determine which input parameter values generate these patterns. We use an example ABM of tumor spheroid growth to showcase how SSRCA identifies four common patterns from the ABM and the parameter regions that generate these outputs. Additionally, we compare the SA results between SSRCA and the popular Sobol' Method and find that SSRCA's identified sensitive parameters are robust to the choice of model descriptors while Sobol's are not. This analysis could streamline data-driven tasks, such as parameter estimation, for ABMs by reducing parameter space. While we highlight these results with an ABM on tumor spheroid formation, the SSRCA Methodology is broadly applicable to biological ABMs.
title SSRCA: a novel machine learning pipeline to perform sensitivity analysis for agent-based models
topic Quantitative Methods
Cell Behavior
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00168