Title
Entropy-based inference of transition states and cellular trajectory for single-cell transcriptomics
Abstract
The development of single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) technology allows researchers to characterize the cell types, states and transitions during dynamic biological processes at single-cell resolution. One of the critical tasks is to infer pseudo-time trajectory. However, the existence of transition cells in the intermediate state of complex biological processes poses a challenge for the trajectory inference. Here, we propose a new single-cell trajectory inference method based on transition entropy, named scTite, to identify transitional states and reconstruct cell trajectory from scRNA-seq data. Taking into account the continuity of cellular processes, we introduce a new metric called transition entropy to measure the uncertainty of a cell belonging to different cell clusters, and then identify cell states and transition cells. Specifically, we adopt different strategies to infer the trajectory for the identified cell states and transition cells, and combine them to obtain a detailed cell trajectory. For the identified cell clusters, we utilize the Wasserstein distance based on the probability distribution to calculate distance between clusters, and construct the minimum spanning tree. Meanwhile, we adopt the signaling entropy and partial correlation coefficient to determine transition paths, which contain a group of transition cells with the largest similarity. Then the transitional paths and the MST are combined to infer a refined cell trajectory. We apply scTite to four real scRNA-seq datasets and an integrated dataset, and conduct extensive performance comparison with nine existing trajectory inference methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can reconstruct the cell trajectory more accurately than the compared algorithms. The scTite software package is available at https://github.com/dblab2022/scTite.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1093/bib/bbac225
BRIEFINGS IN BIOINFORMATICS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
trajectory inference, transition entropy, cell clusters, transition cells, Wasserstein distance
Journal
23
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1467-5463
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yanglan Gan102.03
Cheng Guo200.68
Wenjing Guo320.70
Guangwei Xu401.35
Guobing Zou59520.12