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The system size expansion, also known as van Kampen's expansion or the Ω-expansion, is a technique pioneered by Nico van Kampen〔van Kampen, N. G. (2007) "Stochastic Processes in Physics and Chemistry", North-Holland Personal Library〕 used in the analysis of stochastic processes. Specifically, it allows one to find an approximation to the solution of a master equation with nonlinear transition rates. The leading order term of the expansion is given by the linear noise approximation, in which the master equation is approximated by a Fokker–Planck equation with linear coefficients determined by the transition rates and stoichiometry of the system. Less formally, it is normally straightforward to write down a mathematical description of a system where processes happen randomly (for example, radioactive atoms randomly decay in a physical system, or genes that are expressed stochastically in a cell). However, these mathematical descriptions are often too difficult to solve for the study of the systems statistics (for example, the mean and variance of the number of atoms or proteins as a function of time). The system size expansion allows one to obtain an approximate statistical description that can be solved much more easily than the master equation. == Preliminaries == Systems that admit a treatment with the system size expansion may be described by a probability distribution , giving the probability of observing the system in state at time . may be, for example, a vector with elements corresponding to the number of molecules of different chemical species in a system. In a system of size (intuitively interpreted as the volume), we will adopt the following nomenclature: is a vector of macroscopic copy numbers, is a vector of concentrations, and is a vector of deterministic concentrations, as they would appear according to the rate equation in an infinite system. and are thus quantities subject to stochastic effects. A master equation describes the time evolution of this probability.〔 Henceforth, a system of chemical reactions〔Elf, J. and Ehrenberg, M. (2003) "Fast Evaluation of Fluctuations in Biochemical Networks With the Linear Noise Approximation", ''Genome Research'', 13:2475–2484.〕 will be discussed to provide a concrete example, although the nomenclature of "species" and "reactions" is generalisable. A system involving species and reactions can be described with the master equation: : Here, is the system size, is an operator which will be addressed later, is the stoichiometric matrix for the system (in which element gives the stoichiometric coefficient for species in reaction ), and is the rate of reaction given a state and system size . from the th element of its argument. For example, . This formalism will be useful later. The above equation can be interpreted as follows. The initial sum on the RHS is over all reactions. For each reaction , the brackets immediately following the sum give two terms. The term with the simple coefficient −1 gives the probability flux away from a given state due to reaction changing the state. The term preceded by the product of step operators gives the probability flux due to reaction changing a different state into state . The product of step operators constructs this state . 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「System size expansion」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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