scRSSL: Residual semi-supervised learning with deep generative models to automatically identify cell types.

Journal: IET systems biology
PMID:

Abstract

Single-cell sequencing (scRNA-seq) allows researchers to study cellular heterogeneity in individual cells. In single-cell transcriptomics analysis, identifying the cell type of individual cells is a key task. At present, single-cell datasets often face the challenges of high dimensionality, large number of samples, high sparsity and sample imbalance. The traditional methods of cell type recognition have been challenged. The authors propose a deep residual generation model based on semi-supervised learning (scRSSL) to address these challenges. ScRSSL creatively introduces residual networks into semi-supervised generative models. The authors take advantage of its semi-supervised learning to solve the problem of sample imbalance. During the training of the model, the authors use a residual neural network to accomplish the inference of cell types so that local features of single-cell data can be extracted. Because of the semi-supervised learning approach, it can automatically and accurately predict individual cell types in datasets, even with only a small number of cell labels. Experimentally, the authors' method has proven to have better performance compared to other methods.

Authors

  • Yanru Gao
    School of Computer Science, Qufu Normal University, Rizhao, China.
  • Hongyu Duan
    Department of Statistics and Financial Mathematics, School of Mathematics, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China.
  • Fanhao Meng
    Department of Stomatology, Beijing Friendship Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China.
  • Conghui Zhang
    School of Computer Science, Qufu Normal University, Rizhao, China.
  • Xiyue Li
    School of Computer Science, Qufu Normal University, Rizhao, China.
  • Feng Li
    Department of General Surgery, Shanghai Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)-INTEGRATED Hospital of Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai, China.