Understanding kinetics including
reaction pathways and associated
transition rates is an important yet difficult problem in numerous
chemical and biological systems, especially in situations with multiple
competing pathways. When these high-dimensional systems are projected
on low-dimensional coordinates, which are often needed for enhanced
sampling or for interpretation of simulations and experiments, one
can end up losing the kinetic connectivity of the underlying high-dimensional
landscape. Thus, in the low-dimensional projection, metastable states
might appear closer or further than they actually are. To deal with
this issue, in this work, we develop a formalism that learns a multidimensional
yet minimally complex reaction coordinate (RC) for generic high-dimensional
systems. When projected along this RC, all possible kinetically relevant
pathways can be demarcated and the true high-dimensional connectivity
is maintained. One of the defining attributes of our method lies in
that it can work on long unbiased simulations as well as biased simulations
often needed for rare event systems. We demonstrate the utility of
the method by studying a range of model systems including conformational
transitions in a small peptide Ace-Ala3-Nme, where we show
how two-dimensional and three-dimensional RCs found by our previously
published spectral gap optimization method “SGOOP” [Tiwary,
P. and Berne, B. J. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.
2016,
113, 2839] can capture the kinetics
for 23 and all 28 out of the 28 dominant state-to-state transitions,
respectively.