Systematic Measures of Biological Networks I: Invariant Measures and Entropy

This paper is part I of a two‐part series devoted to the study of systematic measures in a complex biological network modeled by a system of ordinary differential equations. As the mathematical complement to our previous work with collaborators, the series aims at establishing a mathematical foundation for characterizing three important systematic measures: degeneracy, complexity, and robustness, in such a biological network and studying connections among them. To do so, we consider in part I stationary measures of a Fokker‐Planck equation generated from small white noise perturbations of a dissipative system of ordinary differential equations. Some estimations of concentration of stationary measures of the Fokker‐Planck equation in the vicinity of the global attractor are presented. The relationship between the differential entropy of stationary measures and the dimension of the global attractor is also given.© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.