Exploring the limit of using a deep neural network on pileup data for germline variant calling

Single-molecule sequencing technologies have emerged in recent years and revolutionized structural variant calling, complex genome assembly and epigenetic mark detection. However, the lack of a highly accurate small variant caller has limited these technologies from being more widely used. Here, we present Clair, the successor to Clairvoyante, a program for fast and accurate germline small variant calling, using single-molecule sequencing data. For Oxford Nanopore Technology data, Clair achieves better precision, recall and speed than several competing programs, including Clairvoyante, Longshot and Medaka. Through studying the missed variants and benchmarking intentionally overfitted models, we found that Clair may be approaching the limit of possible accuracy for germline small variant calling using pileup data and deep neural networks. Clair requires only a conventional central processing unit (CPU) for variant calling and is an open-source project available at https://github.com/HKU-BAL/Clair.