Customer Reviews

Stochastic Modelling for Systems Biology (Chapman & Hall/CRC Mathematical & Computational Biology)

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This is one of several recent books with system biology in the title, but first book with emphasis on statistics and stochastic approach. The book discusses some simple math models for biological systems, mostly biochemical models. Main focus is on statistical issues in differentail modeling, those as discussed in the nice Bower and Bolouri (2000) book Computational Modeling of Genetic and Biochemical Networks (Computational Molecular Biology), and the strong point is the use of Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo method for stochastic modeling. Weakness is that, the systems considered are too low-dimensional, and there is a long way toward real system biology issues, which will likely be much more complex, and involve potentially many high-dimensional interactions. Overall, it is simply a very straightforward introductory book, lacks depth and breadth. However, it should serve as a good starting point for people who want to learn something about stat and probabilistic methods relevant to bios system modelling.