VADA: A Data-Driven Simulator for Nanopore Sequencing

Nanopore sequencing offers the ability for real-time analysis of long DNA sequences at a low cost, enabling new applications such as early detection of cancer. Due to the complex nature of nanopore measurements and the high cost of obtaining ground truth datasets, there is a need for nanopore simulators. Existing simulators rely on handcrafted rules and parameters and do not learn an internal representation that would allow for analyzing underlying biological factors of interest. Instead, we propose VADA, a purely data-driven method for simulating nanopores based on an autoregressive latent variable model. We embed subsequences of DNA and introduce a conditional prior to address the challenge of a collapsing conditioning. We experiment with an auxiliary regressor on the latent variable to encourage our model to learn an informative latent representation. We empirically demonstrate that our model achieves competitive simulation performance on experimental nanopore data. Moreover, we show our model learns an informative latent representation that is predictive of the DNA labels. We hypothesize that other biological factors of interest, beyond the DNA labels, can potentially be extracted from such a learned latent representation.