A Square Root Approximation of Transition Rates for a Markov State Model

Abstract

Trajectory- or mesh-based methods for analyzing the dynamical behavior of large molecules tend to be impractical due to the curse of dimensionality---their computational cost increases exponentially with the size of the molecule. We propose a method to break the curse by a novel square root approximation of transition rates, Monte Carlo quadrature and a discretization approach based on solving linear programs. With randomly sampled points on the molecular energy landscape and randomly generated discretizations of the molecular configuration space as our initial data, we construct a matrix describing the transition rates between adjacent discretization regions. This transition rate matrix yields a Markov state model of the molecular dynamics. We use Perron cluster analysis and coarse-graining techniques in order to identify metastable sets in configuration space and approximate the transition rates between the metastable sets. Application of our method to a simple energy landscape on a two-dimensional configuration space provides proof of concept and an example for which we compare the performance of different discretizations. We show that the computational cost of our method grows only polynomially with the size of the molecule. However, finding discretizations of higher-dimensional configuration spaces in which metastable sets can be identified remains a challenge.