Efficient and scalable integration of single-cell data using domain-adversarial and variational approximation

Single-cell data provides us new ways of discovering biological truth at the level of individual cells, such as identification of cellular sub-populations and cell development. With the development of single-cell sequencing technologies, a key analytical challenge is to integrate these data sets to uncover biological insights. Here, we developed a domain-adversarial and variational approximation framework, DAVAE, to integrate multiple single-cell data across samples, technologies and modalities without any post hoc data processing. We fit normalized gene expression into a non-linear model, which transforms a latent variable of a lower-dimension into expression space with a non-linear function, a KL regularizier and a domain-adversarial regularizer. Results on five real data integration applications demonstrated the effectiveness and scalability of DAVAE in batch-effect removing, transfer learning, and cell type predictions for multiple single-cell data sets across samples, technologies and modalities. DAVAE was implemented in the toolkit package “scbean” in the pypi repository, and the source code can be also freely accessible at https://github.com/jhu99/scbean .