Is dwell time analysis suitable for single-molecule kinetics?
Three years ago, I was asked to help analyze the kinetic data for another master’s student’s thesis project. The goal was to fit a 3-state Markov model to a set of observations. However, the data was not enough so the dwell time distribution fits badly. At that time, I had probably just learned about the concept of “censored observation”, so I worked on how to recover the information from the censored data as well. We ended up using the msm package that directly estimates the transition rates from state time series. It seemed to work, but I had not justified that choice. Recently, it seems that work is getting prepared for submission, so I found myself revisiting the topic. The findings are surprising, so I wrote them down. ...