Systematic Measures of Biological Networks II: Degeneracy, Complexity, and Robustness

This paper is part II of a two‐part series devoted to the study of systematic measures in a complex bionetwork modeled by a system of ordinary differential equations. In this part, we quantify several systematic measures of a biological network including degeneracy, complexity, and robustness. We will apply the theory of stochastic differential equations to define degeneracy and complexity for a bionetwork. Robustness of the network will be defined according to the strength of attractions to the global attractor. Based on the study of stationary probability measures and entropy made in part I of this series, we will investigate some fundamental properties of these systematic measures, in particular the connections between degeneracy, complexity, and robustness.© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.