No Arabic abstract
Markov state models (MSMs) have been successful in computing metastable states, slow relaxation timescales and associated structural changes, and stationary or kinetic experimental observables of complex molecules from large amounts of molecular dynamics simulation data. However, MSMs approximate the true dynamics by assuming a Markov chain on a clusters discretization of the state space. This approximation is difficult to make for high-dimensional biomolecular systems, and the quality and reproducibility of MSMs has therefore been limited. Here, we discard the assumption that dynamics are Markovian on the discrete clusters. Instead, we only assume that the full phase- space molecular dynamics is Markovian, and a projection of this full dynamics is observed on the discrete states, leading to the concept of Projected Markov Models (PMMs). Robust estimation methods for PMMs are not yet available, but we derive a practically feasible approximation via Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). It is shown how various molecular observables of interest that are often computed from MSMs can be computed from HMMs / PMMs. The new framework is applicable to both, simulation and single-molecule experimental data. We demonstrate its versatility by applications to educative model systems, an 1 ms Anton MD simulation of the BPTI protein, and an optical tweezer force probe trajectory of an RNA hairpin.
The BOUND program calculates the bound states of a complex formed from two interacting particles using coupled-channel methods. It is particularly suitable for the bound states of atom-molecule and molecule-molecule Van der Waals complexes and for the near-threshold bound states that are important in ultracold physics. It uses a basis set for all degrees of freedom except $R$, the separation of the centres of mass of the two particles. The Schrodinger equation is expressed as a set of coupled equations in $R$. Solutions of the coupled equations are propagated outwards from the classically forbidden region at short range and inwards from the classically forbidden region at long range, and matched at a point in the central region. Built-in coupling cases include atom + rigid linear molecule, atom + vibrating diatom, atom + rigid symmetric top, atom + asymmetric or spherical top, rigid diatom + rigid diatom, and rigid diatom + asymmetric top. Both programs provide an interface for plug-in routines to specify coupling cases (Hamiltonians and basis sets) that are not built in. With appropriate plug-in routines, BOUND can take account of the effects of external electric, magnetic and electromagnetic fields, locating bound-state energies at fixed values of the fields. The related program FIELD uses the same plug-in routines and locates values of the fields where bound states exist at a specified energy. As a special case, it can locate values of the external field where bound states cross scattering thresholds and produce zero-energy Feshbach resonances. Plug-in routines are supplied to handle the bound states of a pair of alkali-metal atoms with hyperfine structure in an applied magnetic field.
We study a phase transition in parameter learning of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). We do this by generating sequences of observed symbols from given discrete HMMs with uniformly distributed transition probabilities and a noise level encoded in the output probabilities. By using the Baum-Welch (BW) algorithm, an Expectation-Maximization algorithm from the field of Machine Learning, we then try to estimate the parameters of each investigated realization of an HMM. We study HMMs with n=4, 8 and 16 states. By changing the amount of accessible learning data and the noise level, we observe a phase-transition-like change in the performance of the learning algorithm. For bigger HMMs and more learning data, the learning behavior improves tremendously below a certain threshold in the noise strength. For a noise level above the threshold, learning is not possible. Furthermore, we use an overlap parameter applied to the results of a maximum-a-posteriori (Viterbi) algorithm to investigate the accuracy of the hidden state estimation around the phase transition.
We consider state-aggregation schemes for Markov chains from an information-theoretic perspective. Specifically, we consider aggregating the states of a Markov chain such that the mutual information of the aggregated states separated by T time steps is maximized. We show that for T = 1 this approach recovers the maximum-likelihood estimator of the degree-corrected stochastic block model as a particular case, thereby enabling us to explain certain features of the likelihood landscape of this popular generative network model from a dynamical lens. We further highlight how we can uncover coherent, long-range dynamical modules for which considering a time-scale T >> 1 is essential, using synthetic flows and real-world ocean currents, where we are able to recover the fundamental features of the surface currents of the oceans.
The sensitivity of molecular dynamics on changes in the potential energy function plays an important role in understanding the dynamics and function of complex molecules.We present a method to obtain path ensemble averages of a perturbed dynamics from a set of paths generated by a reference dynamics. It is based on the concept of path probability measure and the Girsanov theorem, a result from stochastic analysis to estimate a change of measure of a path ensemble. Since Markov state models (MSM) of the molecular dynamics can be formulated as a combined phase-space and path ensemble average, the method can be extended toreweight MSMs by combining it with a reweighting of the Boltzmann distribution. We demonstrate how to efficiently implement the Girsanov reweighting in a molecular dynamics simulation program by calculating parts of the reweighting factor on the fly during the simulation, and we benchmark the method on test systems ranging from a two-dimensional diffusion process to an artificial many-body system and alanine dipeptide and valine dipeptide in implicit and explicit water. The method can be used to study the sensitivity of molecular dynamics on external perturbations as well as to reweight trajectories generated by enhanced sampling schemes to the original dynamics.
We consider continuous--time Markov kinetics with a finite number of states and a given positive equilibrium distribution P*. For an arbitrary probability distribution $P$ we study the possible right hand sides, dP/dt, of the Kolmogorov (master) equations. We describe the cone of possible values of the velocity, dP/dt, as a function of P and P*. We prove that, surprisingly, these cones coincide for the class of all Markov processes with equilibrium P* and for the reversible Markov processes with detailed balance at this equilibrium. Therefore, for an arbitrary probability distribution $P$ and a general system there exists a system with detailed balance and the same equilibrium that has the same velocity dP/dt at point P. The set of Lyapunov functions for the reversible Markov processes coincides with the set of Lyapunov functions for general Markov kinetics. The results are extended to nonlinear systems with the generalized mass action law.