Dynamic bounds on stochastic chemical kinetic systems using semidefinite programming

Abstract

© 2018 Author(s). Applying the method of moments to the chemical master equation appearing in stochastic chemical kinetics often leads to the so-called closure problem. Recently, several authors showed that this problem can be partially overcome using moment-based semidefinite programs (SDPs). In particular, they showed that moment-based SDPs can be used to calculate rigorous bounds on various descriptions of the stochastic chemical kinetic system’s stationary distribution(s) - for example, mean molecular counts, variances in these counts, and so on. In this paper, we show that these ideas can be extended to the corresponding dynamic problem, calculating time-varying bounds on the same descriptions.