Dataset Information

Using neural networks for reducing the dimensions of single-cell RNA-Seq data.

ABSTRACT: While only recently developed, the ability to profile expression data in single cells (scRNA-Seq) has already led to several important studies and findings. However, this technology has also raised several new computational challenges. These include questions about the best methods for clustering scRNA-Seq data, how to identify unique group of cells in such experiments, and how to determine the state or function of specific cells based on their expression profile. To address these issues we develop and test a method based on neural networks (NN) for the analysis and retrieval of single cell RNA-Seq data. We tested various NN architectures, some of which incorporate prior biological knowledge, and used these to obtain a reduced dimension representation of the single cell expression data. We show that the NN method improves upon prior methods in both, the ability to correctly group cells in experiments not used in the training and the ability to correctly infer cell type or state by querying a database of tens of thousands of single cell profiles. Such database queries (which can be performed using our web server) will enable researchers to better characterize cells when analyzing heterogeneous scRNA-Seq samples.

SUBMITTER: Lin C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5737331 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Using neural networks for reducing the dimensions of single-cell RNA-Seq data.

Lin Chieh C Jain Siddhartha S Kim Hannah H Bar-Joseph Ziv Z

Nucleic acids research 20170901 17

While only recently developed, the ability to profile expression data in single cells (scRNA-Seq) has already led to several important studies and findings. However, this technology has also raised several new computational challenges. These include questions about the best methods for clustering scRNA-Seq data, how to identify unique group of cells in such experiments, and how to determine the state or function of specific cells based on their expression profile. To address these issues we deve ...[more]

PMID: 28973464

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Project description:Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) has emerged as a powerful technique for studying gene expression patterns at the single-cell level. Inferring gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from scRNA-seq data provides insight into cellular phenotypes from the genomic level. However, the high sparsity, noise and dropout events inherent in scRNA-seq data present challenges for GRN inference. In recent years, the dramatic increase in data on experimentally validated transcription factors binding to DNA has made it possible to infer GRNs by supervised methods. In this study, we address the problem of GRN inference by framing it as a graph link prediction task. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called GNNLink, which leverages known GRNs to deduce the potential regulatory interdependencies between genes. First, we preprocess the raw scRNA-seq data. Then, we introduce a graph convolutional network-based interaction graph encoder to effectively refine gene features by capturing interdependencies between nodes in the network. Finally, the inference of GRN is obtained by performing matrix completion operation on node features. The features obtained from model training can be applied to downstream tasks such as measuring similarity and inferring causality between gene pairs. To evaluate the performance of GNNLink, we compare it with six existing GRN reconstruction methods using seven scRNA-seq datasets. These datasets encompass diverse ground truth networks, including functional interaction networks, Loss of Function/Gain of Function data, non-specific ChIP-seq data and cell-type-specific ChIP-seq data. Our experimental results demonstrate that GNNLink achieves comparable or superior performance across these datasets, showcasing its robustness and accuracy. Furthermore, we observe consistent performance across datasets of varying scales. For reproducibility, we provide the data and source code of GNNLink on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/sdesignates/GNNLink.

Project description:BackgroundSingle-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data provide valuable insights into cellular heterogeneity which is significantly improving the current knowledge on biology and human disease. One of the main applications of scRNA-seq data analysis is the identification of new cell types and cell states. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are among the best methods to address this problem. However, this performance comes with the trade-off for a lack of interpretability in the results. In this work we propose an intelligible pathway-driven neural network to correctly solve cell-type related problems at single-cell resolution while providing a biologically meaningful representation of the data.ResultsIn this study, we explored the deep neural networks constrained by several types of prior biological information, e.g. signaling pathway information, as a way to reduce the dimensionality of the scRNA-seq data. We have tested the proposed biologically-based architectures on thousands of cells of human and mouse origin across a collection of public datasets in order to check the performance of the model. Specifically, we tested the architecture across different validation scenarios that try to mimic how unknown cell types are clustered by the DNN and how it correctly annotates cell types by querying a database in a retrieval problem. Moreover, our approach demonstrated to be comparable to other less interpretable DNN approaches constrained by using protein-protein interactions gene regulation data. Finally, we show how the latent structure learned by the network could be used to visualize and to interpret the composition of human single cell datasets.ConclusionsHere we demonstrate how the integration of pathways, which convey fundamental information on functional relationships between genes, with DNNs, that provide an excellent classification framework, results in an excellent alternative to learn a biologically meaningful representation of scRNA-seq data. In addition, the introduction of prior biological knowledge in the DNN reduces the size of the network architecture. Comparative results demonstrate a superior performance of this approach with respect to other similar approaches. As an additional advantage, the use of pathways within the DNN structure enables easy interpretability of the results by connecting features to cell functionalities by means of the pathway nodes, as demonstrated with an example with human melanoma tumor cells.

Dataset Information

Using neural networks for reducing the dimensions of single-cell RNA-Seq data.

Publications

Using neural networks for reducing the dimensions of single-cell RNA-Seq data.

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