scVAE: variational auto-encoders for single-cell gene expression data
Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
MOTIVATION: Models for analysing and making relevant biological inferences from massive amounts of complex single-cell transcriptomic data typically require several individual data-processing steps, each with their own set of hyperparameter choices. With deep generative models one can work directly with count data, make likelihood-based model comparison, learn a latent representation of the cells and capture more of the variability in different cell populations.
RESULTS: We propose a novel method based on variational auto-encoders (VAEs) for analysis of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. It avoids data preprocessing by using raw count data as input and can robustly estimate the expected gene expression levels and a latent representation for each cell. We tested several count likelihood functions and a variant of the VAE that has a priori clustering in the latent space. We show for several scRNA-seq data sets that our method outperforms recently proposed scRNA-seq methods in clustering cells and that the resulting clusters reflect cell types.
AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Our method, called scVAE, is implemented in Python using the TensorFlow machine-learning library, and it is freely available at https://github.com/scvae/scvae.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Original language | English |
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Journal | Bioinformatics |
Volume | 36 |
Issue number | 16 |
Pages (from-to) | 4415-4422 |
Number of pages | 8 |
ISSN | 1367-4803 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2020 |
Links
- https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/318295v4.full.pdf
Accepted author manuscript
ID: 241358708