[HTML][HTML] MAST: a flexible statistical framework for assessing transcriptional changes and characterizing heterogeneity in single-cell RNA sequencing data

G Finak, A McDavid, M Yajima, J Deng, V Gersuk… - Genome biology, 2015 - Springer
G Finak, A McDavid, M Yajima, J Deng, V Gersuk, AK Shalek, CK Slichter, HW Miller…
Genome biology, 2015Springer
Single-cell transcriptomics reveals gene expression heterogeneity but suffers from
stochastic dropout and characteristic bimodal expression distributions in which expression is
either strongly non-zero or non-detectable. We propose a two-part, generalized linear model
for such bimodal data that parameterizes both of these features. We argue that the cellular
detection rate, the fraction of genes expressed in a cell, should be adjusted for as a source
of nuisance variation. Our model provides gene set enrichment analysis tailored to single …
Abstract
Single-cell transcriptomics reveals gene expression heterogeneity but suffers from stochastic dropout and characteristic bimodal expression distributions in which expression is either strongly non-zero or non-detectable. We propose a two-part, generalized linear model for such bimodal data that parameterizes both of these features. We argue that the cellular detection rate, the fraction of genes expressed in a cell, should be adjusted for as a source of nuisance variation. Our model provides gene set enrichment analysis tailored to single-cell data. It provides insights into how networks of co-expressed genes evolve across an experimental treatment. MAST is available at https://github.com/RGLab/MAST .
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