The telegraph model of transcription: a gene locus has the on rate k, the off rate k off and the RNA polymerase binding rate k RNAP. Nascent RNA molecules are produced in geometrically distributed bursts with mean b = k RNAP / k off, which are spliced and degraded at rates β and γ, respectively. The model’s steady-state distribution can be approximated by a pretrained neural network {{{\mathcal{F}}}} and a set of basis functions (Methods).