Vans, E. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2020

DeepInsight-FS: Selecting features for non-image data using convolutional neural network

Identifying smaller element or gene subsets from biological or other data types is an essential step in discovering underlying mechanisms. Statistical machine learning methods have played a key role in revealing gene subsets. However, growing data complexity is pushing the limits of these techniques. A review of the recent literature shows that arranging elements by similarity in image-form for a convolutional neural network (CNN) improves classification performance over treating them individually. Expanding on this, here we show a pipeline, DeepInsight-FS, to uncover gene subsets of clinical relevance. DeepInsight-FS converts non-image samples into image-form and performs element selection via CNN. To our knowledge, this is the first approach to employ CNN for element or gene selection on non-image data. A real world application of DeepInsight-FS to publicly available cancer data identified gene sets with significant overlap to several cancer-associated pathways suggesting the potential of this method to discover biomedically meaningful connections.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2020

FEATS: Feature selection based clustering of single-cell RNA-seq data

Advances in next-generation sequencing (NGS) have made it possible to carry out transcriptomic studies at single-cell resolution and generate vast amounts of single-cell RNA-seq data rapidly. Thus, tools to analyze this data need to evolve as well to improve accuracy and efficiency. We present FEATS, a python software package that performs clustering on single-cell RNA-seq data. FEATS is capable of performing multiple tasks such as estimating the number of clusters, conducting outlier detection, and integrating data from various experiments. We develop a univariate feature selection based approach for clustering, which involves the selection of top informative features to improve clustering performance. This is motivated by the fact that cell types are often manually determined using the expression of only a few known marker genes. On a variety of single-cell RNA-seq datasets, FEATS gives superior performance compared to the current tools, in terms of adjusted rand index (ARI) and estimating the number of clusters. In addition to cluster estimation, FEATS also performs outlier detection and data integration while giving an excellent computational performance. Thus, FEATS is a comprehensive clustering tool capable of addressing the challenges during the clustering of single-cell RNA-seq data. The installation instructions and documentation of FEATS is available at https://edwinv87.github.io/feats/.

bioinformatics↗