scVIC: deep generative modeling of heterogeneity for scRNA-seq data.

Motivation: Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has become a valuable tool for studying cellular heterogeneity. However, the analysis of scRNA-seq data is challenging because of inherent noise and technical variability. Existing methods often struggle to simultaneously explore heterogeneity across cells, handle dropout events, and account for batch effects. These drawbacks call for a robust and comprehensive method that can address these challenges and provide accurate insights into heterogeneity at the single-cell level. Results: In this study, we introduce scVIC, an algorithm designed to account for variational inference, while simultaneously handling biological heterogeneity and batch effects at the single-cell level. scVIC explicitly models both biological heterogeneity and technical variability to learn cellular heterogeneity in a manner free from dropout events and the bias of batch effects. By leveraging variational inference, we provide a robust framework for inferring the parameters of scVIC. To test the performance of scVIC, we employed both simulated and biological scRNA-seq datasets, either including, or not, batch effects. scVIC was found to outperform other approaches because of its superior clustering ability and circumvention of the batch effects problem. Availability and implementation: The code of scVIC and replication for this study are available at https://github.com/HiBearME/scVIC/tree/v1.0.

NeuralEE: A GPU-Accelerated Elastic Embedding Dimensionality Reduction Method for Visualizing Large-Scale scRNA-Seq Data.

The dramatic increase in amount and size of single-cell RNA sequencing data calls for more efficient and scalable dimensional reduction and visualization tools. Here, we design a GPU-accelerated method, NeuralEE, which aggregates the advantages of elastic embedding and neural network. We show that NeuralEE is both scalable and generalizable in dimensional reduction and visualization of large-scale scRNA-seq data. In addition, the GPU-based implementation of NeuralEE makes it applicable to limited computational resources while maintains high performance, as it takes only half an hour to visualize 1.3 million mice brain cells, and NeuralEE has generalizability for integrating newly generated data.