Estimating entropy production from waiting time distributions

Abstract

Living systems operate far from thermal equilibrium by converting the chemical potential of ATP into mechanical work to achieve growth, replication or locomotion. Given time series observations of intra-, inter- or multicellular processes, a key challenge is to detect non-equilibrium behavior and quantify the rate of free energy consumption. Obtaining reliable bounds on energy consumption and entropy production directly from experimental data remains difficult in practice as many degrees of freedom typically are hidden to the observer, so that the accessible coarse-grained dynamics may not obviously violate detailed balance. Here, we introduce a novel method for bounding the entropy production of physical and living systems which uses only the waiting time statistics of hidden Markov processes and hence can be directly applied to experimental data. By determining a universal limiting curve, we infer entropy production bounds from experimental data for gene regulatory networks, mammalian behavioral dynamics and numerous other biological processes. Further considering the asymptotic limit of increasingly precise biological timers, we estimate the necessary entropic cost of heartbeat regulation in humans, dogs and mice.

arXiv commentImproved exposition in main text, expanded supplementary information. 29 pages, 8 figures

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• Inference in non-equilibrium systems from incomplete information: the case of linear systems and its pitfalls
• Energy and information flows in autonomous systems
• Violation of Local Detailed Balance Despite a Clear Time-Scale Separation
• Modelling Active Non-Markovian Oscillations
• Fluctuations of entropy production of a run-and-tumble particle
• Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relation in Interacting Many-Body Systems
• Universal energy-accuracy tradeoffs in nonequilibrium cellular sensing
• Information-driven transitions in projections of underdamped dynamics
• Coherent structures at the origin of time irreversibility in wall turbulence
• Thermodynamic inference in partially accessible Markov networks: A unifying perspective from transition-based waiting time distributions
• Improved estimation for energy dissipation in biochemical oscillations
• First and Second Laws of Information Processing by Nonequilibrium Dynamical States
• The impact of memory on learning sequence-to-sequence tasks
• Inferring nonequilibrium thermodynamics from tilted equilibrium using information-geometric Legendre transform
• Stochastic paths controlling speed and dissipation
• Inferring entropy production rate from partially observed Langevin dynamics under coarse-graining