Chalmers Conferences, 9th European Conference on Mathematical and Theoretical Biology

Spatial correlations in a multi-species model
Deborah C Markham

Last modified: 2014-06-09

Abstract


Determining the emergent behaviour of a population from the interactions of its individuals is an ongoing challenge in modelling biological phenomena.  Many models classically used assume that the spatial location of each individual is independent of the locations of all other individuals.  This mean-field assumption is not always realistic; we frequently see clusters of individuals in biological settings. In this talk, we will discuss a volume-excluding system with two species undergoing proliferation, migration, and death on a regular lattice.  We examine situations in which a mean-field model no longer provides a valid approximation to the averaged individual behaviour. Furthermore, we provide a tractable alternative model which includes information on the spatial correlations between lattice site occupancies. We demonstrate the improved performance of our correlations model in situations where the mean-field model can no longer be used to approximate the averaged discrete behaviour.