Improvement in model flexibility reveals signaling pathway in T cell responses to pulsatile stimuli (opens in new tab)

Efforts to develop quantitative models must face a trade-off between interpretability and quantitative accuracy, which often disfavors interpretability. Here we adopt an operational definition of interpretability, specifically that a model is described by an arrow diagram wherein each arrow corresponds to a positive effect or negative effect of one component upon a process, and fewer arrows is more interpretable than more arrows. We then develop a method to add flexibility—and thus accuracy i...