a. Introduction The Journal of Chemical Physics article collection on Markov Models of Molecular Kinetics (MMMK)features recent advances developing and using Markov State Models (MSMs) 1-6 in atomistic molecular simulations and related applications -see 7-10 for recent MSM reviews. MSMs have been an important driving force in molecular dynamics (MD), as they facilitate divide-and-conquer integration of short, distributed MD simulations into long-timescale predictions, they are conceptually simple and provide readily-interpretable models of kinetics and thermodynamics.Most MSM estimation approaches proceed by a sequence, or pipeline, of data processing steps that is also represented by MSM software packages [11][12][13] , and typically includes:1. Featurization: The MD coordinates are transformed into features, such as residue distances, contact maps or torsion angles 11,12,14,15 , that form the input of the MSM analysis.
Dimension reduction:The dimension is reduced to much fewer (typically 2-100) slow collective variables (CVs), [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] . The resulting coordinates may be scaled, in order to embed them in a metric space whose distances correspond to some form of dynamical distance 27,28 .
Discretization:The space may be discretized by clustering the projected data 4,7,11,[29][30][31][32][33] , typically resulting in 100-1000 discrete "microstates".
MSM estimation:A transition matrix or rate matrix describing the transition probabilities or rate between the discrete states at some lag time τ is estimated 5,6,34,35 .5. Coarse-graining: In order to get an easier interpretable kinetic model, the MSM from step 5 is often coarse-grained to a few states [36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44] .Some method skip or combine some of these steps, novel machine learning methods attempt to integrate most or all of them in an end-to-end learning framework.