MichiGAN: sampling from disentangled representations of single-cell data using generative adversarial networks.

Journal: Genome biology
PMID:

Abstract

Deep generative models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs) generate and manipulate high-dimensional images. We systematically assess the complementary strengths and weaknesses of these models on single-cell gene expression data. We also develop MichiGAN, a novel neural network that combines the strengths of VAEs and GANs to sample from disentangled representations without sacrificing data generation quality. We learn disentangled representations of three large single-cell RNA-seq datasets and use MichiGAN to sample from these representations. MichiGAN allows us to manipulate semantically distinct aspects of cellular identity and predict single-cell gene expression response to drug treatment.

Authors

  • Hengshi Yu
    Department of Biostatistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA.
  • Joshua D Welch
    Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA. welchjd@umich.edu.