Fig. 2.

Modelling and simulation methods compared based on their level of detail/accuracy versus their computational difficulty. We focus on the fourth category of methods, which we have broken down into sub-categories that we describe in Section 5. The figure is not to scale. *The master equation and the SSA are both ‘exact’ as such (see Section 5), but there are some caveats. The master equation can be solved exactly, numerically or by approximations, whilst the SSA is strictly only exact in the limit of infinite simulations.