Analysis of unique structural identifiability via submodels (Q1070958)

The paper presents a sufficient and necessary condition for unique structural identifiability of linear compartmental models. By virtue of this result unique identifiability can be tested via the analysis of some submodels of the original model. Thus, the identifiability problem is reduced step by step to simpler and, finally, to rather trivial problems. In addition to the knowledge of the symbolic expression of the transfer- function matrix, the proposed method of full-rank submodels requires only some numerical rank determinations, and hence allows for a quick and interactive test for unique structural identifiability. The procedure also gives a lower bound on the number of different solutions.