Computational Methods in Systems Biology

A Scheme for Adaptive Selection of Population Sizes 143

In the future, the interplay of density estimators and population sizes could
be further explored. While the effect of density estimators on acceptance rates
has been already investigated [ 6 , 10 ], it has not been related to population sizes
yet. Alternative approaches to population size adaptation, for instance aiming
for a constant effective population size, could be considered. Comparisons to
methods requiring more specific problem structures than ABC-SMC, such as
accelerated maximum likelihood [ 4 ] or the generalized method of moments [ 12 ],
could be conducted where applicable. The adaptation scheme proposed here is
compatible with virtually any ABC-SMC scheme. We expect our method to be
applied to a wide range of model selection and parameter estimation tasks.

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