Improving Nanopore Reads Raw Signal Alignment

Abstract

We investigate usage of dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm for aligning raw signal data from MinION sequencer. DTW is mostly using for fast alignment for selective sequencing to quickly determine whether a read comes from sequence of interest. We show that standard usage of DTW has low discriminative power mainly due to problem with accurate estimation of scaling parameters. We propose a simple variation of DTW algorithm, which does not suffer from scaling problems and has much higher discriminative power.