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Abstract Recent advances in biochemistry and single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) have allowed us to monitor the biological systems at the single-cell resolution. However, the low capture of mRNA material within individual cells often leads to inaccurate quantification of genetic material. Consequently, a significant amount of expression values are reported as missing, which are often referred to as dropouts. To overcome this challenge, we develop a novel imputation method, named single-cell Imputation via Subspace Regression (scISR), that can reliably recover the dropout values of scRNA-seq data. The scISR method first uses a hypothesis-testing technique to identify zero-valued entries that are most likely affected by dropout events and then estimates the dropout values using a subspace regression model. Our comprehensive evaluation using 25 publicly available scRNA-seq datasets and various simulation scenarios against five state-of-the-art methods demonstrates that scISR is better than other imputation methods in recovering scRNA-seq expression profiles via imputation. scISR consistently improves the quality of cluster analysis regardless of dropout rates, normalization techniques, and quantification schemes. The source code of scISR can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/duct317/scISR .
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Evaluating Model-free Directional Dependency Methods on Single-cell RNA Sequencing Data with Severe Dropout
As severe dropout in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) degrades data quality, current methods for network inference face increased uncertainty from such data. To examine how dropout influences directional dependency inference from scRNA-seq data, we thus studied four methods based on discrete data that are model-free without parametric model assumptions. They include two established methods: conditional entropy and Kruskal-Wallis test, and two recent methods: causal inference by stochastic complexity and function index. We also included three non-directional methods for a contrast. On simulated data, function index performed most favorably at varying dropout rates, sample sizes, and discrete levels. On an scRNA-seq dataset from developing mouse cerebella, function index and Kruskal-Wallis test performed favorably over other methods in detecting expression of developmental genes as a function of time. Overall among the four methods, function index is most resistant to dropout for both directional and dependency inference. The next best choice, Kruskal-Wallis test, carries a directional bias towards a uniformly distributed variable. We conclude that a method robust to marginal distributions with a sufficiently large sample size can reap benefits of single-cell over bulk RNA sequencing in understanding molecular mechanisms at the cellular resolution.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1661331
- PAR ID:
- 10163567
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of International Conference on Bioinformatics Research and Applications (ICBRA)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 55 to 62
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3383783.3383793
