Visualizing hierarchies in scRNA-seq data using a density tree-biased autoencoder

Motivation: Single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data makes studying the development of cells possible at unparalleled resolution. Given that many cellular differentiation processes are hierarchical, their scRNA-seq data is expected to be approximately tree-shaped in gene expression space. Inferen...

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Main Authors: Garrido, Quentin (Author) , Damrich, Sebastian (Author) , Jäger, Alexander (Author) , Cerletti, Dario (Author) , Claassen, Manfred (Author) , Najman, Laurent (Author) , Hamprecht, Fred (Author)
Format: Article (Journal) Chapter/Article
Language:English
Published: 22 Apr 2022
In: Arxiv
Year: 2021, Pages: 1-18
DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2102.05892
Online Access:Verlag, lizenzpflichtig, Volltext: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2102.05892
Verlag, lizenzpflichtig, Volltext: http://arxiv.org/abs/2102.05892
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Author Notes:Quentin Garrido, Sebastian Damrich, Alexander Jäger, Dario Cerletti, Manfred Claassen, Laurent Najman, Fred Hamprecht
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Summary:Motivation: Single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data makes studying the development of cells possible at unparalleled resolution. Given that many cellular differentiation processes are hierarchical, their scRNA-seq data is expected to be approximately tree-shaped in gene expression space. Inference and representation of this tree-structure in two dimensions is highly desirable for biological interpretation and exploratory analysis.Results:Our two contributions are an approach for identifying a meaningful tree structure from high-dimensional scRNA-seq data, and a visualization method respecting the tree-structure. We extract the tree structure by means of a density based minimum spanning tree on a vector quantization of the data and show that it captures biological information well. We then introduce DTAE, a tree-biased autoencoder that emphasizes the tree structure of the data in low dimensional space. We compare to other dimension reduction methods and demonstrate the success of our method both qualitatively and quantitatively on real and toy data.Availability: Our implementation relying on PyTorch and Higra is available at https://github.com/hci-unihd/DTAE.
Item Description:Gesehen am 13.07.2022
Physical Description:Online Resource
DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2102.05892