Calibrations and validations of biological models with an application on the renal fibrosis

We calibrate a mathematical model of renal tubulointerstitial fibrosis by Hao et al which is used to explore potential drugs for Lupus Nephritis, against a real data set of 84 patients. For this purpose, we present a general calibration procedure which can be used for the calibration analysis of other biological systems as well. Central to the procedure is the idea of designing a Bayesian Gaussian process (GP) emulator that can be used as a surrogate of the fibrosis mathematical model which is computationally expensive to run massively at every input value. The procedure relies on detecting influential model parameters by a GP-based sensitivity analysis, and calibrating them by specifying a maximum likelihood criterion, tailored to the application, which is optimized via Bayesian global optimization.