Contrastive Cycle Adversarial Autoencoders for Single-cell Multi-omics Alignment and Integration

Muilti-modality data are ubiquitous in biology, especially that we have entered the multi-omics era, when we can measure the same biological object (cell) from different aspects (omics) to provide a more comprehensive insight into the cellular system. When dealing with such multi-omics data, the first step is to determine the correspondence among different modalities. In other words, we should match data from different spaces corresponding to the same object. This problem is particularly challenging in the single-cell multi-omics scenario because such data are very sparse with extremely high dimensions. Secondly, matched single-cell multi-omics data are rare and hard to collect. Furthermore, due to the limitations of the experimental environment, the data are usually highly noisy. To promote the single-cell multi-omics research, we overcome the above challenges, proposing a novel framework to align and integrate single-cell RNA-seq data and single-cell ATAC-seq data. Our approach can efficiently map the above data with high sparsity and noise from different spaces to a low-dimensional manifold in a unified space, making the downstream alignment and integration straightforward. Compared with the other state-of-the-art methods, our method performs better in both simulated and real single-cell data. The proposed method is helpful for the single-cell multi-omics research. The improvement for integration on the simulated data is significant.

Estimating the dimensionality of the manifold underlying multi-electrode neural recordings

It is generally accepted that the number of neurons in a given brain area far exceeds the number of neurons needed to carry any specific function controlled by that area. For example, motor areas of the human brain contain tens of millions of neurons that control the activation of tens or at most hundreds of muscles. This massive redundancy implies the covariation of many neurons, which constrains the population activity to a low-dimensional manifold within the space of all possible patterns of neural activity. To gain a conceptual understanding of the complexity of the neural activity within a manifold, it is useful to estimate its dimensionality, which quantifies the number of degrees of freedom required to describe the observed population activity without significant information loss. While there are many algorithms for dimensionality estimation, we do not know which are well suited for analyzing neural activity. The objective of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of several representative algorithms for estimating the dimensionality of linearly and nonlinearly embedded data. We generated synthetic neural recordings with known intrinsic dimensionality and used them to test the algorithms’ accuracy and robustness. We emulated some of the important challenges associated with experimental data by adding noise, altering the nature of the embedding of the low-dimensional manifold within the high-dimensional recordings, varying the dimensionality of the manifold, and limiting the amount of available data. We demonstrated that linear algorithms overestimate the dimensionality of nonlinear, noise-free data. In cases of high noise, most algorithms overestimated the dimensionality. We thus developed a denoising algorithm based on deep learning, the “Joint Autoencoder”, which significantly improved subsequent dimensionality estimation. Critically, we found that all algorithms failed when the intrinsic dimensionality was high (above 20) or when the amount of data used for estimation was low. Based on the challenges we observed, we formulated a pipeline for estimating the dimensionality of experimental neural data.

Exploring the Latent Manifold of City Patterns

Understanding how cities evolve through time and how humans interact with their surroundings is a complex but essential task that is necessary for designing better urban environments. Recent developments in artificial intelligence can give researchers and city developers powerful tools, and through their usage, new insights can be gained on this issue. Discovering a high-level structure in a set of observations within a low-dimensional manifold is a common strategy used when applying machine learning techniques to tackle several problems while finding a projection from and onto the underlying data distribution. This so-called latent manifold can be used in many applications such as clustering, data visualization, sampling, density estimation, and unsupervised learning. Moreover, data of city patterns has some particularities, such as having superimposed or natural patterns that correspond to those of the depicted locations. In this research, multiple manifolds are explored and derived from city pattern images. A set of quantitative and qualitative tests are proposed to examine the quality of these manifolds. In addition, to demonstrate these tests, a novel specialized dataset of city patterns of multiple locations is created, with the dataset capturing a set of recognizable superimposed patterns.

Across-animal odor decoding by probabilistic manifold alignment

Identifying the common structure of neural dynamics across subjects is key for extracting unifying principles of brain computation and for many brain machine interface applications. Here, we propose a novel probabilistic approach for aligning stimulus-evoked responses from multiple animals in a common low dimensional manifold and use hierarchical inference to identify which stimulus drives neural activity in any given trial. Our probabilistic decoder is robust to a range of features of the neural responses and significantly outperforms existing neural alignment procedures. When applied to recordings from the mouse olfactory bulb, our approach reveals low-dimensional population dynamics that are odor specific and have consistent structure across animals. Thus, our decoder can be used for increasing the robustness and scalability of neural-based chemical detection.

Exploring Chemical Reaction Space With Reaction Difference Fingerprints and Parametric t-SNE

<div>Humans prefer visual representations for the analysis of large databases. In this work, we suggest a method for the visualization of the chemical reaction space. Our technique uses the t-SNE approach that is parameterized by a deep neural network (parametric t-SNE). We demonstrated that the parametric t-SNE combined with reaction difference fingerprints could provide a tool for the projection of chemical reactions onto a low-dimensional manifold for easy exploration of reaction space. We showed that the global reaction landscape, been projected onto a 2D plane, corresponds well with already known reaction types. The application of a pretrained parametric t-SNE model to new reactions allows chemists to study these reactions in a global reaction space. We validated the feasibility of this approach for two marketed drugs: darunavir and oseltamivir. We believe that our method can help to explore reaction space and will inspire chemists to find new reactions and synthetic ways. </div><div><br></div>

Exploring Chemical Reaction Space With Reaction Difference Fingerprints and Parametric t-SNE

<div>Humans prefer visual representations for the analysis of large databases. In this work, we suggest a method for the visualization of the chemical reaction space. Our technique uses the t-SNE approach that is parameterized by a deep neural network (parametric t-SNE). We demonstrated that the parametric t-SNE combined with reaction difference fingerprints can provide a tool for the projection of chemical reactions onto a low-dimensional manifold for easy exploration of reaction space. We showed that the global reaction landscape, been projected onto a 2D plane, corresponds well with already known reaction types. The application of a pretrained parametric t-SNE model to new reactions allows chemists to study these reactions on a global reaction space. We validated the feasibility of this approach for two marketed drugs: darunavir and oseltamivir. We believe that our method can help explore reaction space and inspire chemists to find new reactions and synthetic ways. </div><div><br></div>

Exploring Chemical Reaction Space With Reaction Difference Fingerprints and Parametric t-SNE

<div>Humans prefer visual representations for the analysis of large databases. In this work, we suggest a method for the visualization of the chemical reaction space. Our technique uses the t-SNE approach that is parameterized by a deep neural network (parametric t-SNE). We demonstrated that the parametric t-SNE combined with reaction difference fingerprints can provide a tool for the projection of chemical reactions onto a low-dimensional manifold for easy exploration of reaction space. We showed that the global reaction landscape, been projected onto a 2D plane, corresponds well with already known reaction types. The application of a pretrained parametric t-SNE model to new reactions allows chemists to study these reactions on a global reaction space. We validated the feasibility of this approach for two marketed drugs: darunavir and oseltamivir. We believe that our method can help explore reaction space and inspire chemists to find new reactions and synthetic ways. </div><div><br></div>