DIMM-SC: a Dirichlet mixture model for clustering droplet-based single cell transcriptomic data
DIMM-SC: a Dirichlet mixture model for clustering droplet-based single cell transcriptomic data
复制标题
DIMM-SC:用于聚类基于液滴的单细胞转录组数据的狄利克雷混合模型
DOI:
10.1093/bioinformatics/btx490
复制
发表时间:
2018-01-01
期刊:
影响因子:
5.8
通讯作者:
Chen, Wei
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Sun, Zhe;Wang, Ting;Chen, Wei
Motivation
Single cell transcriptome sequencing (scRNA-Seq) has become a revolutionary tool to study cellular and molecular processes at single cell resolution. Among existing technologies, the recently developed droplet-based platform enables efficient parallel processing of thousands of single cells with direct counting of transcript copies using Unique Molecular Identifier (UMI). Despite the technology advances, statistical methods and computational tools are still lacking for analyzing droplet-based scRNA-Seq data. Particularly, model-based approaches for clustering large-scale single cell transcriptomic data are still under-explored.
Results
We developed DIMM-SC, a Dirichlet Mixture Model for clustering droplet-based Single Cell transcriptomic data. This approach explicitly models UMI count data from scRNA-Seq experiments and characterizes variations across different cell clusters via a Dirichlet mixture prior. We performed comprehensive simulations to evaluate DIMM-SC and compared it with existing clustering methods such as K-means, CellTree and Seurat. In addition, we analyzed public scRNA-Seq datasets with known cluster labels and in-house scRNA-Seq datasets from a study of systemic sclerosis with prior biological knowledge to benchmark and validate DIMM-SC. Both simulation studies and real data applications demonstrated that overall, DIMM-SC achieves substantially improved clustering accuracy and much lower clustering variability compared to other existing clustering methods. More importantly, as a model-based approach, DIMM-SC is able to quantify the clustering uncertainty for each single cell, facilitating rigorous statistical inference and biological interpretations, which are typically unavailable from existing clustering methods.
Availability and implementation
DIMM-SC has been implemented in a user-friendly R package with a detailed tutorial available on www.pitt.edu/∼wec47/singlecell.html.
Contact
wei.chen@chp.edu or hum@ccf.org.
Supplementary information
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.