Sensitivity analysis of quasi-stationary-distributions (QSDs)

Abstract

This paper studies the sensitivity analysis of mass-action systems against their diffusion approximations, particularly the dependence on population sizes. As a continuous time Markov chain, a mass-action system can be described by a equation driven by finite many Poisson processes, which has a diffusion approximation that can be pathwisely matched. The magnitude of noise in mass-action systems is proportional to the square root of the molecule count/population, which makes a large class of mass-action systems have quasi-stationary distributions (QSDs) instead of invariant probability measures. In this paper we modify the coupling based technique developed in [8] to estimate an upper bound of the 1-Wasserstein distance between two QSDs. Some numerical results for sensitivity with different population sizes are provided.