Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Du, Yihang, Hu, Jiaying, Hou, Suyang, Ding, Yueyang, Sun, Xiaobo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14128
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913848594792448
author Du, Yihang
Hu, Jiaying
Hou, Suyang
Ding, Yueyang
Sun, Xiaobo
author_facet Du, Yihang
Hu, Jiaying
Hou, Suyang
Ding, Yueyang
Sun, Xiaobo
contents Spatial labeling assigns labels to specific spatial locations to characterize their spatial properties and relationships, with broad applications in scientific research and practice. Measuring the similarity between two spatial labelings is essential for understanding their differences and the contributing factors, such as changes in location properties or labeling methods. An adequate and unbiased measurement of spatial labeling similarity should consider the number of matched labels (label agreement), the topology of spatial label distribution, and the heterogeneous impacts of mismatched labels. However, existing methods often fail to account for all these aspects. To address this gap, we propose a methodological framework to guide the development of methods that meet these requirements. Given two spatial labelings, the framework transforms them into graphs based on location organization, labels, and attributes (e.g., location significance). The distributions of their graph attributes are then extracted, enabling an efficient computation of distributional discrepancy to reflect the dissimilarity level between the two labelings. We further provide a concrete implementation of this framework, termed Spatial Labeling Analogy Metric (SLAM), along with an analysis of its theoretical foundation, for evaluating spatial labeling results in spatial transcriptomics (ST) \textit{as per} their similarity with ground truth labeling. Through a series of carefully designed experimental cases involving both simulated and real ST data, we demonstrate that SLAM provides a comprehensive and accurate reflection of labeling quality compared to other well-established evaluation metrics. Our code is available at https://github.com/YihDu/SLAM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_14128
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Methodological Framework for Measuring Spatial Labeling Similarity
Du, Yihang
Hu, Jiaying
Hou, Suyang
Ding, Yueyang
Sun, Xiaobo
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Spatial labeling assigns labels to specific spatial locations to characterize their spatial properties and relationships, with broad applications in scientific research and practice. Measuring the similarity between two spatial labelings is essential for understanding their differences and the contributing factors, such as changes in location properties or labeling methods. An adequate and unbiased measurement of spatial labeling similarity should consider the number of matched labels (label agreement), the topology of spatial label distribution, and the heterogeneous impacts of mismatched labels. However, existing methods often fail to account for all these aspects. To address this gap, we propose a methodological framework to guide the development of methods that meet these requirements. Given two spatial labelings, the framework transforms them into graphs based on location organization, labels, and attributes (e.g., location significance). The distributions of their graph attributes are then extracted, enabling an efficient computation of distributional discrepancy to reflect the dissimilarity level between the two labelings. We further provide a concrete implementation of this framework, termed Spatial Labeling Analogy Metric (SLAM), along with an analysis of its theoretical foundation, for evaluating spatial labeling results in spatial transcriptomics (ST) \textit{as per} their similarity with ground truth labeling. Through a series of carefully designed experimental cases involving both simulated and real ST data, we demonstrate that SLAM provides a comprehensive and accurate reflection of labeling quality compared to other well-established evaluation metrics. Our code is available at https://github.com/YihDu/SLAM.
title A Methodological Framework for Measuring Spatial Labeling Similarity
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14128