scholarly journals Explainability methods for differential gene analysis of single cell RNA-seq clustering models

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madalina Ciortan ◽  
Matthieu Defrance
Keyword(s):  
Single Cell ◽  
Traditional Approach ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Clustering Methods ◽  
Numerous Model ◽  
Cell Class ◽  
Gradient Based ◽  
Differential Gene ◽  
Downstream Analysis

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) produces transcriptomic profiling for individual cells. Due to the lack of cell-class annotations, scRNA-seq is routinely analyzed with unsupervised clustering methods. Because these methods are typically limited to producing clustering predictions (that is, assignment of cells to clusters of similar cells), numerous model agnostic differential expression (DE) libraries have been proposed to identify the genes expressed differently in the detected clusters, as needed in the downstream analysis. In parallel, the advancements in neural networks (NN) brought several model-specific explainability methods to identify salient features based on gradients, eliminating the need for external models. We propose a comprehensive study to compare the performance of dedicated DE methods, with that of explainability methods typically used in machine learning, both model agnostic (such as SHAP, permutation importance) and model-specific (such as NN gradient-based methods). The DE analysis is performed on the results of 3 state-of-the-art clustering methods based on NNs. Our results on 36 simulated datasets indicate that all analyzed DE methods have limited agreement between them and with ground-truth genes. The gradients method outperforms the traditional DE methods, which encourages the development of NN-based clustering methods to provide an out-of-the-box DE capability. Employing DE methods on the input data preprocessed by clustering method outperforms the traditional approach of using the original count data, albeit still performing worse than gradient-based methods.

scholarly journals Benchmarking UMI-based single-cell RNA-seq preprocessing workflows

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yue You ◽  
Luyi Tian ◽  
Shian Su ◽  
Xueyi Dong ◽  
Jafar S. Jabbari ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Single Cell ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Clustering Methods ◽  
Biological Complexity ◽  
Cell Type ◽  
Analysis Process ◽  
Single Cell Rna Sequencing ◽  
Downstream Analysis ◽  
Almost All

Abstract Background Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies and associated analysis methods have rapidly developed in recent years. This includes preprocessing methods, which assign sequencing reads to genes to create count matrices for downstream analysis. While several packaged preprocessing workflows have been developed to provide users with convenient tools for handling this process, how they compare to one another and how they influence downstream analysis have not been well studied. Results Here, we systematically benchmark the performance of 10 end-to-end preprocessing workflows (Cell Ranger, Optimus, salmon alevin, alevin-fry, kallisto bustools, dropSeqPipe, scPipe, zUMIs, celseq2, and scruff) using datasets yielding different biological complexity levels generated by CEL-Seq2 and 10x Chromium platforms. We compare these workflows in terms of their quantification properties directly and their impact on normalization and clustering by evaluating the performance of different method combinations. While the scRNA-seq preprocessing workflows compared vary in their detection and quantification of genes across datasets, after downstream analysis with performant normalization and clustering methods, almost all combinations produce clustering results that agree well with the known cell type labels that provided the ground truth in our analysis. Conclusions In summary, the choice of preprocessing method was found to be less important than other steps in the scRNA-seq analysis process. Our study comprehensively compares common scRNA-seq preprocessing workflows and summarizes their characteristics to guide workflow users.

scholarly journals Benchmarking UMI-based single cell RNA-sequencing preprocessing workflows

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yue You ◽  
Luyi Tian ◽  
Shian Su ◽  
Xueyi Dong ◽  
Jafar Sheikh Jabbari ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Single Cell ◽  
Rna Sequencing ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Clustering Methods ◽  
Analysis Process ◽  
Single Cell Rna Sequencing ◽  
Systematic Biases ◽  
Downstream Analysis ◽  
Almost All

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies and associated analysis methods have undergone rapid development in recent years. This includes methods for data preprocessing, which assign sequencing reads to genes to create count matrices for downstream analysis. Several packaged preprocessing workflows have been developed that aim to provide users with convenient tools for handling this process. How different preprocessing workflows compare to one another and influence downstream analysis has been less well studied. Here, we systematically benchmark the performance of 9 end-to-end preprocessing workflows (Cell Ranger, Optimus, salmon alevin, kallisto bustools, dropSeqPipe, scPipe, zUMIs, celseq2 and scruff) using datasets with varying levels of biological complexity generated on the CEL-Seq2 and 10x Chromium platforms. We compare these workflows in terms of their quantification properties directly and their impact on normalization and clustering by evaluating the performance of different method combinations. We find that lowly expressed genes are discordant between workflows and observe that some workflows have systematic biases towards particular classes of genomics features. While the scRNA-seq preprocessing workflows compared varied in their detection and quantification of genes across datasets, after downstream analysis with performant normalization and clustering methods, almost all combinations produced clustering results that agreed well with the known cell type labels that provided the ground truth in our analysis. In summary, the choice of preprocessing method was found to be less influential than other steps in the scRNA-seq analysis process. Our study comprehensively compares common scRNAseq preprocessing workflows and summarizes their characteristics to guide workflow users.

scholarly journals Single-Cell Transcriptomics: Current Methods and Challenges in Data Acquisition and Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asif Adil ◽  
Vijay Kumar ◽  
Arif Tasleem Jan ◽  
Mohammed Asger
Keyword(s):  
Single Cell ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Data Generation ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Transcriptomics Data ◽  
Differential Gene ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Downstream Analysis ◽  
Immense Potential

Rapid cost drops and advancements in next-generation sequencing have made profiling of cells at individual level a conventional practice in scientific laboratories worldwide. Single-cell transcriptomics [single-cell RNA sequencing (SC-RNA-seq)] has an immense potential of uncovering the novel basis of human life. The well-known heterogeneity of cells at the individual level can be better studied by single-cell transcriptomics. Proper downstream analysis of this data will provide new insights into the scientific communities. However, due to low starting materials, the SC-RNA-seq data face various computational challenges: normalization, differential gene expression analysis, dimensionality reduction, etc. Additionally, new methods like 10× Chromium can profile millions of cells in parallel, which creates a considerable amount of data. Thus, single-cell data handling is another big challenge. This paper reviews the single-cell sequencing methods, library preparation, and data generation. We highlight some of the main computational challenges that require to be addressed by introducing new bioinformatics algorithms and tools for analysis. We also show single-cell transcriptomics data as a big data problem.

scholarly journals Clustering Single-Cell RNA-Seq Data with Regularized Gaussian Graphical Model

Genes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 311
Author(s):  
Zhenqiu Liu
Keyword(s):  
Single Cell ◽  
Free Parameter ◽  
Graphical Model ◽  
Expression Patterns ◽  
Information Criterion ◽  
Log P ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Clustering Methods ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Free Parameters

Single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) is a powerful tool to measure the expression patterns of individual cells and discover heterogeneity and functional diversity among cell populations. Due to variability, it is challenging to analyze such data efficiently. Many clustering methods have been developed using at least one free parameter. Different choices for free parameters may lead to substantially different visualizations and clusters. Tuning free parameters is also time consuming. Thus there is need for a simple, robust, and efficient clustering method. In this paper, we propose a new regularized Gaussian graphical clustering (RGGC) method for scRNA-seq data. RGGC is based on high-order (partial) correlations and subspace learning, and is robust over a wide-range of a regularized parameter λ. Therefore, we can simply set λ=2 or λ=log(p) for AIC (Akaike information criterion) or BIC (Bayesian information criterion) without cross-validation. Cell subpopulations are discovered by the Louvain community detection algorithm that determines the number of clusters automatically. There is no free parameter to be tuned with RGGC. When evaluated with simulated and benchmark scRNA-seq data sets against widely used methods, RGGC is computationally efficient and one of the top performers. It can detect inter-sample cell heterogeneity, when applied to glioblastoma scRNA-seq data.

scholarly journals Best practices on the differential expression analysis of multi-species RNA-seq

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Chung ◽  
Vincent M. Bruno ◽  
David A. Rasko ◽  
Christina A. Cuomo ◽  
José F. Muñoz ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
Differential Expression ◽  
Expression Analysis ◽  
Differential Expression Analysis ◽  
Single Species ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Species Analysis ◽  
Differential Gene ◽  
Multiple Species ◽  
Downstream Analysis

AbstractAdvances in transcriptome sequencing allow for simultaneous interrogation of differentially expressed genes from multiple species originating from a single RNA sample, termed dual or multi-species transcriptomics. Compared to single-species differential expression analysis, the design of multi-species differential expression experiments must account for the relative abundances of each organism of interest within the sample, often requiring enrichment methods and yielding differences in total read counts across samples. The analysis of multi-species transcriptomics datasets requires modifications to the alignment, quantification, and downstream analysis steps compared to the single-species analysis pipelines. We describe best practices for multi-species transcriptomics and differential gene expression.

scholarly journals sc-REnF:An entropy guided robust feature selection for clustering of single-cell rna-seq data

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Snehalika Lall ◽  
Abhik Ghosh ◽  
Sumanta Ray ◽  
Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay
Keyword(s):  
Single Cell ◽  
Gene Selection ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Technical Noise ◽  
Marker Selection ◽  
Cell Clustering ◽  
Typing Methods ◽  
Original Application ◽  
Downstream Analysis ◽  
Cell Typing

ABSTRACTMany single-cell typing methods require pure clustering of cells, which is susceptible towards the technical noise, and heavily dependent on high quality informative genes selected in the preliminary steps of downstream analysis. Techniques for gene selection in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data are seemingly simple which casts problems with respect to the resolution of (sub-)types detection, marker selection and ultimately impacts towards cell annotation. We introduce sc-REnF, a novel and robust entropy based feature (gene) selection method, which leverages the landmark advantage of ‘Renyi’ and ‘Tsallis’ entropy achieved in their original application, in single cell clustering. Thereby, gene selection is robust and less sensitive towards the technical noise present in the data, producing a pure clustering of cells, beyond classifying independent and unknown sample with utmost accuracy. The corresponding software is available at: https://github.com/Snehalikalall/sc-REnF

scholarly journals RgCop-A regularized copula based method for gene selection in single cell rna-seq data

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (10) ◽  
pp. e1009464
Author(s):  
Snehalika Lall ◽  
Sumanta Ray ◽  
Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay
Keyword(s):  
Single Cell ◽  
Gene Selection ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Classification Performance ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Scale Invariant ◽  
Dependence Measure ◽  
Highly Expressed Genes ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Downstream Analysis

Gene selection in unannotated large single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data is important and crucial step in the preliminary step of downstream analysis. The existing approaches are primarily based on high variation (highly variable genes) or significant high expression (highly expressed genes) failed to provide stable and predictive feature set due to technical noise present in the data. Here, we propose RgCop, a novel regularized copula based method for gene selection from large single cell RNA-seq data. RgCop utilizes copula correlation (Ccor), a robust equitable dependence measure that captures multivariate dependency among a set of genes in single cell expression data. We raise an objective function by adding a l1 regularization term with Ccor to penalizes the redundant co-efficient of features/genes, resulting non-redundant effective features/genes set. Results show a significant improvement in the clustering/classification performance of real life scRNA-seq data over the other state-of-the-art. RgCop performs extremely well in capturing dependence among the features of noisy data due to the scale invariant property of copula, thereby improving the stability of the method. Moreover, the differentially expressed (DE) genes identified from the clusters of scRNA-seq data are found to provide an accurate annotation of cells. Finally, the features/genes obtained from RgCop can able to annotate the unknown cells with high accuracy.

scholarly journals Enhancing droplet-based single-nucleus RNA-seq resolution using the semi-supervised machine learning classifier DIEM

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Alvarez ◽  
Elior Rahmani ◽  
Brandon Jew ◽  
Kristina M. Garske ◽  
Zong Miao ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Gene Expression ◽  
Single Cell ◽  
Cell Types ◽  
Supervised Machine Learning ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Single Nucleus ◽  
Downstream Analysis

AbstractSingle-nucleus RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq) measures gene expression in individual nuclei instead of cells, allowing for unbiased cell type characterization in solid tissues. Contrary to single-cell RNA seq (scRNA-seq), we observe that snRNA-seq is commonly subject to contamination by high amounts of extranuclear background RNA, which can lead to identification of spurious cell types in downstream clustering analyses if overlooked. We present a novel approach to remove debris-contaminated droplets in snRNA-seq experiments, called Debris Identification using Expectation Maximization (DIEM). Our likelihood-based approach models the gene expression distribution of debris and cell types, which are estimated using EM. We evaluated DIEM using three snRNA-seq data sets: 1) human differentiating preadipocytes in vitro, 2) fresh mouse brain tissue, and 3) human frozen adipose tissue (AT) from six individuals. All three data sets showed various degrees of extranuclear RNA contamination. We observed that existing methods fail to account for contaminated droplets and led to spurious cell types. When compared to filtering using these state of the art methods, DIEM better removed droplets containing high levels of extranuclear RNA and led to higher quality clusters. Although DIEM was designed for snRNA-seq data, we also successfully applied DIEM to single-cell data. To conclude, our novel method DIEM removes debris-contaminated droplets from single-cell-based data fast and effectively, leading to cleaner downstream analysis. Our code is freely available for use at https://github.com/marcalva/diem.

scholarly journals Feature selection and dimension reduction for single-cell RNA-Seq based on a multinomial model

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
F. William Townes ◽  
Stephanie C. Hicks ◽  
Martin J. Aryee ◽  
Rafael A. Irizarry
Keyword(s):  
Feature Selection ◽  
Dimension Reduction ◽  
Single Cell ◽  
Current Practice ◽  
Principal Component ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Normal Distributions ◽  
Multinomial Sampling ◽  
Negative Controls

AbstractSingle-cell RNA-Seq (scRNA-Seq) profiles gene expression of individual cells. Recent scRNA-Seq datasets have incorporated unique molecular identifiers (UMIs). Using negative controls, we show UMI counts follow multinomial sampling with no zero inflation. Current normalization procedures such as log of counts per million and feature selection by highly variable genes produce false variability in dimension reduction. We propose simple multinomial methods, including generalized principal component analysis (GLM-PCA) for non-normal distributions, and feature selection using deviance. These methods outperform the current practice in a downstream clustering assessment using ground truth datasets.

scholarly journals SINC: a scale-invariant deep-neural-network classifier for bulk and single-cell RNA-seq data

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (6) ◽  
pp. 1779-1784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chuanqi Wang ◽  
Jun Li
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Single Cell ◽  
Count Data ◽  
Deep Neural Network ◽  
Sequencing Depth ◽  
Supplementary Information ◽  
Neural Network Classifier ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Scale Invariant ◽  
Downstream Analysis

Abstract Motivation Scaling by sequencing depth is usually the first step of analysis of bulk or single-cell RNA-seq data, but estimating sequencing depth accurately can be difficult, especially for single-cell data, risking the validity of downstream analysis. It is thus of interest to eliminate the use of sequencing depth and analyze the original count data directly. Results We call an analysis method ‘scale-invariant’ (SI) if it gives the same result under different estimates of sequencing depth and hence can use the original count data without scaling. For the problem of classifying samples into pre-specified classes, such as normal versus cancerous, we develop a deep-neural-network based SI classifier named scale-invariant deep neural-network classifier (SINC). On nine bulk and single-cell datasets, the classification accuracy of SINC is better than or competitive to the best of eight other classifiers. SINC is easier to use and more reliable on data where proper sequencing depth is hard to determine. Availability and implementation This source code of SINC is available at https://www.nd.edu/∼jli9/SINC.zip. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document