Lewis Baker, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado Boulder
Inference of Diffusion Coefficients from Single Molecule Trajectories
Single particle tracking (SPT) enables experimentalists to observe the movement of individual molecules in various experimental contexts. As this field advances, the questions posed by researchers require increasingly nuanced analyses of the trajectories. In this project, we investigate a switch diffusion process, wherein the motion of a particle is governed by a discrete set of diffusive states, and the tendency of the particle to switch between these states is random. We consider two frameworks for this: a mixture model and a hidden Markov model (HMM), and implement a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) scheme to infer the underlying parameters of a trajectory.