Agent-based models (ABMs) have become essential tools for simulating complex biological, ecological, and social systems where emergent behaviors arise from the interactions among individual agents. Quantifying uncertainty through global sensitivity analysis is crucial for assessing the robustness and reliability of ABM predictions. However, most global sensitivity methods demand substantial computational resources, making them impractical for highly complex models. Here, we introduce SMoRe GloS (Surrogate Modeling for Recapitulating Global Sensitivity), a novel, computationally efficient method for performing global sensitivity analysis of ABMs. By leveraging explicitly formulated surrogate models, SMoRe GloS allows for comprehensive parameter space exploration and uncertainty quantification without sacrificing accuracy. We demonstrate our method's flexibility by applying it to two biological ABMs: a simple 2D in vitro cell proliferation model and a complex 3D vascular tumor growth model. Our results show that SMoRe GloS is compatible with simpler methods like the Morris one-at-a-time method, and more computationally intensive variance-based methods like eFAST. SMoRe GloS accurately recovered global sensitivity indices in each case while achieving substantial speedups, completing analyses in minutes. In contrast, direct implementation of eFAST amounted to several days of CPU time for the complex ABM. Remarkably, our method also estimates sensitivities for ABM parameters representing processes not explicitly included in the surrogate model, further enhancing its utility. By making global sensitivity analysis feasible for computationally expensive models, SMoRe GloS opens up new opportunities for uncertainty quantification in complex systems, allowing for more in depth exploration of model behavior, thereby increasing confidence in model predictions.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013427.].

Graph generative models have been extensively studied in the data mining literature. While traditional techniques are based on generating structures that adhere to a pre-decided distribution, recent techniques have shifted towards learning this distribution directly from the data. While learning-based approaches have imparted significant improvement in quality, some limitations remain to be addressed. First, learning graph distributions introduces additional computational overhead, which limits their scalability to large graph databases. Second, many techniques only learn the structure and do not address the need to also learn node and edge labels, which encode important semantic information and influence the structure itself. Third, existing techniques often incorporate domain-specific rules and lack generalizability. Fourth, the experimentation of existing techniques is not comprehensive enough due to either using weak evaluation metrics or focusing primarily on synthetic or small datasets. In this work, we develop a domain-agnostic technique called GraphGen to overcome all of these limitations. GraphGen converts graphs to sequences using minimum DFS codes. Minimum DFS codes are canonical labels and capture the graph structure precisely along with the label information. The complex joint distributions between structure and semantic labels are learned through a novel LSTM architecture. Extensive experiments on million-sized, real graph datasets show GraphGen to be 4 times faster on average than state-of-the-art techniques while being significantly better in quality across a comprehensive set of 11 different metrics. Our code is released at: https://github.com/idea-iitd/graphgen.