Transcriptomic forecasting with neural ODEs

Single cell transcriptomics technologies can uncover changes in the molecular states that underlie cellular phenotypes. However, understanding the dynamic cellular processes requires extending from inferring trajectories from snapshots of cellular states to estimating temporal changes in cellular gene expression. To address this challenge, we have developed a neural ordinary differential equation-based method, RNAForecaster, for predicting gene expression states in single cells for multiple future time steps in an embedding-independent manner. We demonstrate that RNAForecaster can accurately predict future expression states in simulated single cell transcriptomic data with cellular tracking over time. We then show that using metabolic labeling scRNA-seq data from constitutively dividing cells, RNAForecaster accurately recapitulates many of the expected changes in gene expression during progression through the cell cycle over a three day period. Thus, RNAForecaster enables short term estimation of future expression states in biological systems from high-throughput datasets with temporal information.