KAD is designed for evaluating the accuracy of nucleotide base quality of genome assemblies. Briefly, abundance of k-mers are quantified for both sequencing reads and assembly sequences. Comparison of the two values results in a single value per k-mer, K-mer Abundance Difference (KAD), which indicates how well the assembly matches read data for each k-mer.
where, c is the count of a k-mer from reads, m is the mode of counts of read k-mers, and n is the copy of the k-mer in the assembly.