A Genetic Algorithm for Optimal Control of Probabilistic Boolean Networks

Abstract

We study the problem of finding optimal control policies for Probabilistic Boolean Networks (PBNs). Boolean Networks (BNs) and PBNs are effective tools for modeling genetic regulatory networks. A PBN is a collection of BNs driven by a Markov chain process. It is well-known that the control/intervention of a genetic regulatory network is useful for avoiding undesirable states associated with diseases like cancer. The optimal control problem can be formulated as a probabilistic dynamic programming problem. However, due to the curse of dimensionality, the complexity of the problem is huge. The main objective of this paper is to introduce a Genetic Algorithm (GA) approach for the optimal control problem. Numerical results are given to demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed GA method.