Interplay of synergy and redundancy in diamond motif

TL;DR

This paper uses partial information decomposition to analyze synergy and redundancy in biochemical network motifs, revealing how these information components influence high-fidelity signal transmission.

Contribution

It applies the net synergy metric to a diamond motif and its sub-motifs, providing new insights into their information processing mechanisms and the roles of network parameters.

Findings

Synergy and redundancy patterns differ between motifs.

Time scales and activation coefficients significantly affect information flow.

Decomposition explains the origins of synergy and redundancy.

Abstract

The formalism of partial information decomposition provides independent or non-overlapping components constituting total information content provided by a set of source variables about the target variable. These components are recognised as unique information, synergistic information and, redundant information. The metric of net synergy, conceived as the difference between synergistic and redundant information, is capable of detecting synergy, redundancy and, information independence among stochastic variables. And it can be quantified, as it is done here, using appropriate combinations of different Shannon mutual information terms. Utilisation of such a metric in network motifs with the nodes representing different biochemical species, involved in information sharing, uncovers rich store for interesting results. In the current study, we make use of this formalism to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the relative information processing mechanism in a diamond motif and two of its sub-motifs namely bifurcation and integration motif embedded within the diamond motif. The emerging patterns of synergy and redundancy and their effective contribution towards ensuring high fidelity information transmission are duly compared in the sub-motifs and independent motifs (bifurcation and integration). In this context, the crucial roles played by various time scales and activation coefficients in the network topologies are especially emphasised. We show that the origin of synergy and redundancy in information transmission can be physically justified by decomposing diamond motif into bifurcation and integration motif.