Complex Systems, Data, and Inference

The concepts of complexity and networks are recurrent in modern systems biology. They are intimately linked to the very nature of biological processes governed by mathematically complex laws and orchestrated by thousands of interactions among thousands of molecular components. In this chapter, we explain what it means for a system to be complex, what are the mathematical tools and the abstract data structures that we can use to describe a complex system, and finally what challenges the scientific community must face today to deduce a mathematical or computational model from experimental observations.