Feature selection and dimension reduction for single-cell RNA-Seq based on a multinomial model

Abstract Single-cell RNA-Seq (scRNA-Seq) profiles gene expression of individual cells. Recent scRNA-Seq datasets have incorporated unique molecular identifiers (UMIs). Using negative controls, we show UMI counts follow multinomial sampling with no zero inflation. Current normalization procedures suc...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: F. William Townes, Stephanie C. Hicks, Martin J. Aryee, Rafael A. Irizarry
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: BMC 2019-12-01
Series:Genome Biology
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-019-1861-6
Description
Summary:Abstract Single-cell RNA-Seq (scRNA-Seq) profiles gene expression of individual cells. Recent scRNA-Seq datasets have incorporated unique molecular identifiers (UMIs). Using negative controls, we show UMI counts follow multinomial sampling with no zero inflation. Current normalization procedures such as log of counts per million and feature selection by highly variable genes produce false variability in dimension reduction. We propose simple multinomial methods, including generalized principal component analysis (GLM-PCA) for non-normal distributions, and feature selection using deviance. These methods outperform the current practice in a downstream clustering assessment using ground truth datasets.
ISSN:1474-760X