A quantitative framework for evaluating single-cell data structure preservation by dimensionality reduction techniques

Summary High-dimensional data, such as those generated using single-cell RNA sequencing, present challenges in interpretation and visualization. Numerical and computational methods for dimensionality reduction allow for low-dimensional representation of genome-scale expression data for downstream clustering, trajectory reconstruction, and biological interpretation. However, a comprehensive and quantitative evaluation of the performance of these techniques has not been established. We present an unbiased framework that defines metrics of global and local structure preservation in dimensionality reduction transformations. Using discrete and continuous scRNA-seq datasets, we find that input cell distribution and method parameters are largely determinant of global, local, and organizational data structure preservation by eleven published dimensionality reduction methods. Code available at github.com/KenLauLab/DR-structure-preservation allows for rapid evaluation of further datasets and methods.