UCL Discovery Stage
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery Stage

bayNorm: Bayesian gene expression recovery, imputation and normalization for single-cell RNA-sequencing data

Tang, Wenhao; Bertaux, Francois; Thomas, Philipp; Stefanelli, Claire; Saint, Malika; Marguerat, Samuel; Shahrezaei, Vahid; (2020) bayNorm: Bayesian gene expression recovery, imputation and normalization for single-cell RNA-sequencing data. Bioinformatics , 36 (4) pp. 1174-1181. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btz726. Green open access

[thumbnail of bayNorm Bayesian gene expression recovery, imputation and normalization for single-cell RNA-sequencing data.pdf]
Preview
PDF
bayNorm Bayesian gene expression recovery, imputation and normalization for single-cell RNA-sequencing data.pdf - Other

Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

Motivation: Normalization of single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) data is a prerequisite to their interpretation. The marked technical variability, high amounts of missing observations and batch effect typical of scRNA-seq datasets make this task particularly challenging. There is a need for an efficient and unified approach for normalization, imputation and batch effect correction. Results: Here, we introduce bayNorm, a novel Bayesian approach for scaling and inference of scRNA-seq counts. The method's likelihood function follows a binomial model of mRNA capture, while priors are estimated from expression values across cells using an empirical Bayes approach. We first validate our assumptions by showing this model can reproduce different statistics observed in real scRNA-seq data. We demonstrate using publicly available scRNA-seq datasets and simulated expression data that bayNorm allows robust imputation of missing values generating realistic transcript distributions that match single molecule fluorescence in situ hybridization measurements. Moreover, by using priors informed by dataset structures, bayNorm improves accuracy and sensitivity of differential expression analysis and reduces batch effect compared with other existing methods. Altogether, bayNorm provides an efficient, integrated solution for global scaling normalization, imputation and true count recovery of gene expression measurements from scRNA-seq data. Availability and implementation: The R package 'bayNorm' is publishd on bioconductor at https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/bayNorm.html. The code for analyzing data in this article is available at https://github. com/WT215/bayNorm_papercode.

Type: Article
Title: bayNorm: Bayesian gene expression recovery, imputation and normalization for single-cell RNA-sequencing data
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btz726
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btz726
Language: English
Additional information: © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10185982
Downloads since deposit
36Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item