Comparison of simulated annealing and SASS for parameter estimation of biochemical networks

Estimating the parameters of biochemical networks from time-courses is becoming increasingly important. There have been some attempts in the past to carry out this task in an automatic way. In this research, SASS, a novel heuristic optimisation algorithm that has only one control parameter, has been used to solve this problem. While the obtained estimations are similar to those using other recent techniques, the method presented here offers a better resistance to local minima and a decrease of a 20% in average in computational cost, without the need of finding a suitable set of control parameters.