XHap: haplotype assembly using long-distance read correlations learned by transformers

Abstract

Summary Reconstructing haplotypes of an organism from a set of sequencing reads is a computationally challenging (NP-hard) problem. In reference-guided settings, at the core of haplotype assembly is the task of clustering reads according to their origin, i.e. grouping together reads that sample the same haplotype. Read length limitations and sequencing errors render this problem difficult even for diploids; the complexity of the problem grows with the ploidy of the organism. We present XHap, a novel method for haplotype assembly that aims to learn correlations between pairs of sequencing reads, including those that do not overlap but may be separated by large genomic distances, and utilize the learned correlations to assemble the haplotypes. This is accomplished by leveraging transformers, a powerful deep-learning technique that relies on the attention mechanism to discover dependencies between non-overlapping reads. Experiments on semi-experimental and real data demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in diploid and polyploid haplotype assembly tasks on both short and long sequencing reads. Availability and implementation The code for XHap and the included experiments is available at https://github.com/shoryaconsul/XHap.