Is your data alignable? Principled and interpretable alignability testing and integration of single-cell data

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Main Authors: Ma, Rong, Sun, Eric D., Donoho, David, Zou, James
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Ma, Rong
Sun, Eric D.
Donoho, David
Zou, James
author_facet Ma, Rong
Sun, Eric D.
Donoho, David
Zou, James
contents Single-cell data integration can provide a comprehensive molecular view of cells, and many algorithms have been developed to remove unwanted technical or biological variations and integrate heterogeneous single-cell datasets. Despite their wide usage, existing methods suffer from several fundamental limitations. In particular, we lack a rigorous statistical test for whether two high-dimensional single-cell datasets are alignable (and therefore should even be aligned). Moreover, popular methods can substantially distort the data during alignment, making the aligned data and downstream analysis difficult to interpret. To overcome these limitations, we present a spectral manifold alignment and inference (SMAI) framework, which enables principled and interpretable alignability testing and structure-preserving integration of single-cell data with the same type of features. SMAI provides a statistical test to robustly assess the alignability between datasets to avoid misleading inference, and is justified by high-dimensional statistical theory. On a diverse range of real and simulated benchmark datasets, it outperforms commonly used alignment methods. Moreover, we show that SMAI improves various downstream analyses such as identification of differentially expressed genes and imputation of single-cell spatial transcriptomics, providing further biological insights. SMAI's interpretability also enables quantification and a deeper understanding of the sources of technical confounders in single-cell data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_01839
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Is your data alignable? Principled and interpretable alignability testing and integration of single-cell data
Ma, Rong
Sun, Eric D.
Donoho, David
Zou, James
Quantitative Methods
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Genomics
Applications
Machine Learning
Single-cell data integration can provide a comprehensive molecular view of cells, and many algorithms have been developed to remove unwanted technical or biological variations and integrate heterogeneous single-cell datasets. Despite their wide usage, existing methods suffer from several fundamental limitations. In particular, we lack a rigorous statistical test for whether two high-dimensional single-cell datasets are alignable (and therefore should even be aligned). Moreover, popular methods can substantially distort the data during alignment, making the aligned data and downstream analysis difficult to interpret. To overcome these limitations, we present a spectral manifold alignment and inference (SMAI) framework, which enables principled and interpretable alignability testing and structure-preserving integration of single-cell data with the same type of features. SMAI provides a statistical test to robustly assess the alignability between datasets to avoid misleading inference, and is justified by high-dimensional statistical theory. On a diverse range of real and simulated benchmark datasets, it outperforms commonly used alignment methods. Moreover, we show that SMAI improves various downstream analyses such as identification of differentially expressed genes and imputation of single-cell spatial transcriptomics, providing further biological insights. SMAI's interpretability also enables quantification and a deeper understanding of the sources of technical confounders in single-cell data.
title Is your data alignable? Principled and interpretable alignability testing and integration of single-cell data
topic Quantitative Methods
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Genomics
Applications
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01839