Accounting for cell type hierarchy in evaluating single cell RNA-seq clustering

Abstract Cell clustering is one of the most common routines in single cell RNA-seq data analyses, for which a number of specialized methods are available. The evaluation of these methods ignores an important biological characteristic that the structure for a population of cells is hierarchical, whic...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhijin Wu, Hao Wu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: BMC 2020-05-01
Series:Genome Biology
Subjects:
Online Access:http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-020-02027-x
Description
Summary:Abstract Cell clustering is one of the most common routines in single cell RNA-seq data analyses, for which a number of specialized methods are available. The evaluation of these methods ignores an important biological characteristic that the structure for a population of cells is hierarchical, which could result in misleading evaluation results. In this work, we develop two new metrics that take into account the hierarchical structure of cell types. We illustrate the application of the new metrics in constructed examples as well as several real single cell datasets and show that they provide more biologically plausible results.
ISSN:1474-760X