scholarly journals Hierarchicell: an R-package for estimating power for tests of differential expression with single-cell data

BMC Genomics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kip D. Zimmerman ◽  
Carl D. Langefeld

Abstract Background Study design is a critical aspect of any experiment, and sample size calculations for statistical power that are consistent with that study design are central to robust and reproducible results. However, the existing power calculators for tests of differential expression in single-cell RNA-seq data focus on the total number of cells and not the number of independent experimental units, the true unit of interest for power. Thus, current methods grossly overestimate the power. Results Hierarchicell is the first single-cell power calculator to explicitly simulate and account for the hierarchical correlation structure (i.e., within sample correlation) that exists in single-cell RNA-seq data. Hierarchicell, an R-package available on GitHub, estimates the within sample correlation structure from real data to simulate hierarchical single-cell RNA-seq data and estimate power for tests of differential expression. This multi-stage approach models gene dropout rates, intra-individual dispersion, inter-individual variation, variable or fixed number of cells per individual, and the correlation among cells within an individual. Without modeling the within sample correlation structure and without properly accounting for the correlation in downstream analysis, we demonstrate that estimates of power are falsely inflated. Hierarchicell can be used to estimate power for binary and continuous phenotypes based on user-specified number of independent experimental units (e.g., individuals) and cells within the experimental unit. Conclusions Hierarchicell is a user-friendly R-package that provides accurate estimates of power for testing hypotheses of differential expression in single-cell RNA-seq data. This R-package represents an important addition to single-cell RNA analytic tools and will help researchers design experiments with appropriate and accurate power, increasing discovery and improving robustness and reproducibility.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhun Miao ◽  
Ke Deng ◽  
Xiaowo Wang ◽  
Xuegong Zhang

AbstractSummaryThe excessive amount of zeros in single-cell RNA-seq data include “real” zeros due to the on-off nature of gene transcription in single cells and “dropout” zeros due to technical reasons. Existing differential expression (DE) analysis methods cannot distinguish these two types of zeros. We developed an R package DEsingle which employed Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial model to estimate the proportion of real and dropout zeros and to define and detect 3 types of DE genes in single-cell RNA-seq data with higher accuracy.Availability and ImplementationThe R package DEsingle is freely available at https://github.com/miaozhun/DEsingle and is under Bioconductor’s consideration [email protected] informationSupplementary data are available at bioRxiv online.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (24) ◽  
pp. 5155-5162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chengzhong Ye ◽  
Terence P Speed ◽  
Agus Salim

Abstract Motivation Dropout is a common phenomenon in single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data, and when left unaddressed it affects the validity of the statistical analyses. Despite this, few current methods for differential expression (DE) analysis of scRNA-seq data explicitly model the process that gives rise to the dropout events. We develop DECENT, a method for DE analysis of scRNA-seq data that explicitly and accurately models the molecule capture process in scRNA-seq experiments. Results We show that DECENT demonstrates improved DE performance over existing DE methods that do not explicitly model dropout. This improvement is consistently observed across several public scRNA-seq datasets generated using different technological platforms. The gain in improvement is especially large when the capture process is overdispersed. DECENT maintains type I error well while achieving better sensitivity. Its performance without spike-ins is almost as good as when spike-ins are used to calibrate the capture model. Availability and implementation The method is implemented as a publicly available R package available from https://github.com/cz-ye/DECENT. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Himel Mallick ◽  
Suvo Chatterjee ◽  
Shrabanti Chowdhury ◽  
Saptarshi Chatterjee ◽  
Ali Rahnavard ◽  
...  

SummaryThe performance of computational methods and software to identify differentially expressed genes in single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) has been shown to be influenced by several factors, including the choice of the normalization method used and the choice of the experimental platform (or library preparation protocol) to profile gene expression in individual cells. Currently, it is up to the practitioner to choose the most appropriate differential expression (DE) method out of over 100 DE tools available to date, each relying on their own assumptions to model scRNA-seq data. Here, we propose to use generalized linear models with the Tweedie distribution that can flexibly capture a large dynamic range of observed scRNA-seq data across experimental platforms induced by heavy tails, sparsity, or different count distributions to model the technological variability in scRNA-seq expression profiles. We also propose a zero-inflated Tweedie model that allows zero probability mass to exceed a traditional Tweedie distribution to model zero-inflated scRNA-seq data with excessive zero counts. Using both synthetic and published plate- and droplet-based scRNA-seq datasets, we performed a systematic benchmark evaluation of more than 10 representative DE methods and demonstrate that our method (Tweedieverse) outperforms the state-of-the-art DE approaches across experimental platforms in terms of statistical power and false discovery rate control. Our open-source software (R package) is available at https://github.com/himelmallick/Tweedieverse.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dustin J. Sokolowski ◽  
Mariela Faykoo-Martinez ◽  
Lauren Erdman ◽  
Huayun Hou ◽  
Cadia Chan ◽  
...  

AbstractRNA sequencing (RNA-seq) is widely used to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and reveal biological mechanisms underlying complex biological processes. RNA-seq is often performed on heterogeneous samples and the resulting DEGs do not necessarily indicate the cell types where the differential expression occurred. While single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) methods solve this problem, technical and cost constraints currently limit its widespread use. Here we present single cell Mapper (scMappR), a method that assigns cell-type specificity scores to DEGs obtained from bulk RNA-seq by integrating cell-type expression data generated by scRNA-seq and existing deconvolution methods. After benchmarking scMappR using RNA-seq data obtained from sorted blood cells, we asked if scMappR could reveal known cell-type specific changes that occur during kidney regeneration. We found that scMappR appropriately assigned DEGs to cell-types involved in kidney regeneration, including a relatively small proportion of immune cells. While scMappR can work with any user supplied scRNA-seq data, we curated scRNA-seq expression matrices for ∼100 human and mouse tissues to facilitate its use with bulk RNA-seq data alone. Overall, scMappR is a user-friendly R package that complements traditional differential expression analysis available at CRAN.HighlightsscMappR integrates scRNA-seq and bulk RNA-seq to re-calibrate bulk differentially expressed genes (DEGs).scMappR correctly identified immune-cell expressed DEGs from a bulk RNA-seq analysis of mouse kidney regeneration.scMappR is deployed as a user-friendly R package available at CRAN.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (16) ◽  
pp. 4432-4439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yet Nguyen ◽  
Dan Nettleton

Abstract Motivation With the reduction in price of next-generation sequencing technologies, gene expression profiling using RNA-seq has increased the scope of sequencing experiments to include more complex designs, such as designs involving repeated measures. In such designs, RNA samples are extracted from each experimental unit at multiple time points. The read counts that result from RNA sequencing of the samples extracted from the same experimental unit tend to be temporally correlated. Although there are many methods for RNA-seq differential expression analysis, existing methods do not properly account for within-unit correlations that arise in repeated-measures designs. Results We address this shortcoming by using normalized log-transformed counts and associated precision weights in a general linear model pipeline with continuous autoregressive structure to account for the correlation among observations within each experimental unit. We then utilize parametric bootstrap to conduct differential expression inference. Simulation studies show the advantages of our method over alternatives that do not account for the correlation among observations within experimental units. Availability and implementation We provide an R package rmRNAseq implementing our proposed method (function TC_CAR1) at https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rmRNAseq/index.html. Reproducible R codes for data analysis and simulation are available at https://github.com/ntyet/rmRNAseq/tree/master/simulation.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chengzhong Ye ◽  
Terence P Speed ◽  
Agus Salim

AbstractDropout is a common phenomenon in single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data, and when left unaddressed affects the validity of the statistical analyses. Despite this, few current methods for differential expression (DE) analysis of scRNA-seq data explicitly model the dropout process. We develop DECENT, a DE method for scRNA-seq data that explicitly models the dropout process and performs statistical analyses on the inferred pre-dropout counts. We demonstrate using simulated and real datasets the superior performance of DECENT compared to existing methods. DECENT does not require spike-in data, but spike-ins can be used to improve performance when available. The method is implemented in a publicly-available R package.


Author(s):  
Irzam Sarfraz ◽  
Muhammad Asif ◽  
Joshua D Campbell

Abstract Motivation R Experiment objects such as the SummarizedExperiment or SingleCellExperiment are data containers for storing one or more matrix-like assays along with associated row and column data. These objects have been used to facilitate the storage and analysis of high-throughput genomic data generated from technologies such as single-cell RNA sequencing. One common computational task in many genomics analysis workflows is to perform subsetting of the data matrix before applying down-stream analytical methods. For example, one may need to subset the columns of the assay matrix to exclude poor-quality samples or subset the rows of the matrix to select the most variable features. Traditionally, a second object is created that contains the desired subset of assay from the original object. However, this approach is inefficient as it requires the creation of an additional object containing a copy of the original assay and leads to challenges with data provenance. Results To overcome these challenges, we developed an R package called ExperimentSubset, which is a data container that implements classes for efficient storage and streamlined retrieval of assays that have been subsetted by rows and/or columns. These classes are able to inherently provide data provenance by maintaining the relationship between the subsetted and parent assays. We demonstrate the utility of this package on a single-cell RNA-seq dataset by storing and retrieving subsets at different stages of the analysis while maintaining a lower memory footprint. Overall, the ExperimentSubset is a flexible container for the efficient management of subsets. Availability and implementation ExperimentSubset package is available at Bioconductor: https://bioconductor.org/packages/ExperimentSubset/ and Github: https://github.com/campbio/ExperimentSubset. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (19) ◽  
pp. 3340-3348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhijin Wu ◽  
Yi Zhang ◽  
Michael L Stitzel ◽  
Hao Wu

Author(s):  
Massimo Andreatta ◽  
Santiago J Carmona

Abstract Summary STACAS is a computational method for the identification of integration anchors in the Seurat environment, optimized for the integration of single-cell (sc) RNA-seq datasets that share only a subset of cell types. We demonstrate that by (i) correcting batch effects while preserving relevant biological variability across datasets, (ii) filtering aberrant integration anchors with a quantitative distance measure and (iii) constructing optimal guide trees for integration, STACAS can accurately align scRNA-seq datasets composed of only partially overlapping cell populations. Availability and implementation Source code and R package available at https://github.com/carmonalab/STACAS; Docker image available at https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/mandrea1/stacas_demo.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document