Dataset Information

Statistics or biology: the zero-inflation controversy about scRNA-seq data.

ABSTRACT: Researchers view vast zeros in single-cell RNA-seq data differently: some regard zeros as biological signals representing no or low gene expression, while others regard zeros as missing data to be corrected. To help address the controversy, here we discuss the sources of biological and non-biological zeros; introduce five mechanisms of adding non-biological zeros in computational benchmarking; evaluate the impacts of non-biological zeros on data analysis; benchmark three input data types: observed counts, imputed counts, and binarized counts; discuss the open questions regarding non-biological zeros; and advocate the importance of transparent analysis.

SUBMITTER: Jiang R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8783472 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Statistics or biology: the zero-inflation controversy about scRNA-seq data.

Jiang Ruochen R Sun Tianyi T Song Dongyuan D Li Jingyi Jessica JJ

Genome biology 20220121 1

Researchers view vast zeros in single-cell RNA-seq data differently: some regard zeros as biological signals representing no or low gene expression, while others regard zeros as missing data to be corrected. To help address the controversy, here we discuss the sources of biological and non-biological zeros; introduce five mechanisms of adding non-biological zeros in computational benchmarking; evaluate the impacts of non-biological zeros on data analysis; benchmark three input data types: observ ...[more]

PMID: 35063006

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Project description:BackgroundSingle-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has emerged has a main strategy to study transcriptional activity at the cellular level. Clustering analysis is routinely performed on scRNA-seq data to explore, recognize or discover underlying cell identities. The high dimensionality of scRNA-seq data and its significant sparsity accentuated by frequent dropout events, introducing false zero count observations, make the clustering analysis computationally challenging. Even though multiple scRNA-seq clustering techniques have been proposed, there is no consensus on the best performing approach. On a parallel research track, self-supervised contrastive learning recently achieved state-of-the-art results on images clustering and, subsequently, image classification.ResultsWe propose contrastive-sc, a new unsupervised learning method for scRNA-seq data that perform cell clustering. The method consists of two consecutive phases: first, an artificial neural network learns an embedding for each cell through a representation training phase. The embedding is then clustered in the second phase with a general clustering algorithm (i.e. KMeans or Leiden community detection). The proposed representation training phase is a new adaptation of the self-supervised contrastive learning framework, initially proposed for image processing, to scRNA-seq data. contrastive-sc has been compared with ten state-of-the-art techniques. A broad experimental study has been conducted on both simulated and real-world datasets, assessing multiple external and internal clustering performance metrics (i.e. ARI, NMI, Silhouette, Calinski scores). Our experimental analysis shows that constastive-sc compares favorably with state-of-the-art methods on both simulated and real-world datasets.ConclusionOn average, our method identifies well-defined clusters in close agreement with ground truth annotations. Our method is computationally efficient, being fast to train and having a limited memory footprint. contrastive-sc maintains good performance when only a fraction of input cells is provided and is robust to changes in hyperparameters or network architecture. The decoupling between the creation of the embedding and the clustering phase allows the flexibility to choose a suitable clustering algorithm (i.e. KMeans when the number of expected clusters is known, Leiden otherwise) or to integrate the embedding with other existing techniques.

Dataset Information

Statistics or biology: the zero-inflation controversy about scRNA-seq data.

Publications

Statistics or biology: the zero-inflation controversy about scRNA-seq data.

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