[Population Modeling] A PopModWkGrpIMAG-news mailing list submission

[Hunt, C. Anthony]

I’ve been reading this newsletter from the beginning.  I read and was informed by the Group’s SummerSim papers characterizing what the WG sees as the field of Population Modeling.

I am also working within others within the MSM Consortium to resist the very natural trend toward over-specialization of language and methods within the larger simulation research community.

>From a simulation science perspective (i.e., at the important technical levels), how is Population Modeling, as characterized by you, clearly distinguishable from apparently quite similar activities within other domains?  We could pose the same question to folks engaged in simulation research in systems biology, ecological, neurology, etc.  Specifically:

At the levels of simulation design, implementation, virtual experiments, and software execution, how is a virtual heterogeneous population of virus-infected and non-infected entities (which map to humans) responding to changes in their simulated environment different from a heterogeneous virtual population of individualized “trout” responding to stressors within a model of an endangered habitat?

At those same levels, how is a virtual heterogeneous population of “patients” responding to a simulated therapeutic intervention different from a virtual heterogeneous population of individualized “hepatocytes” responding to a single dose of a simulated therapeutic?

Do you see important distinctions? It will be very helpful to have your answers.

In thinking about answers to such questions, I found this recent paper to be helpful.  Grimm & Berger, Structural realism, emergence, and predictions in next-generation ecological modelling: Synthesis from a special issue. Ecological Modelling 326:177–187 (2016), available here:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304380016000077
and here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bxi6G-kYIqhtV19mVHdNNGl4RnM

Regards
-Tony-
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