scDREAMER: atlas-level integration of single-cell datasets using deep generative model paired with adversarial classifier

Integration of heterogeneous single-cell sequencing datasets generated across multiple tissue locations, time and conditions is essential for a comprehensive understanding of the cellular states and expression programs underlying complex biological systems. Here, we present scDREAMER (https://github.com/Zafar-Lab/scDREAMER), a novel data integration framework that employs a novel adversarial variational autoencoder for learning lower-dimensional cellular embeddings and a batch classifier neural network for the removal of batch effects. Using five real benchmarking datasets, we demonstrated that scDREAMER can overcome critical challenges including the presence of skewed cell types among batches, nested batch effects, large number of batches and conservation of development trajectory across different batches. Moreover, our benchmarking demonstrated that scDREAMER outperformed state-of-the-art methods in batch-correction and conservation of biological variation. Using a 1 million cells dataset, we further showed that scDREAMER is scalable and can perform atlas-level integration across species (e.g., human and mouse) while being faster than other deep-learning-based methods.