Adaptive Total-Variation Regularized Low-Rank Representation for Analyzing Single-Cell RNA-seq Data

High-throughput sequencing of single-cell gene expression reveals a complex mechanism of individual cell’s heterogeneity in a population. An important purpose for analyzing single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data is to identify cell subtypes and functions by cell clustering. To deal with high levels of noise and cellular heterogeneity, we introduced a new single cell data analysis model called Adaptive Total-Variation Regularized Low-Rank Representation (ATV-LRR). In scRNA-seq data, ATV-LRR can reconstruct the low-rank subspace structure to learn the similarity of cells. The low-rank representation can not only segment multiple linear subspaces, but also extract important information. Moreover, adaptive total variation also can remove cell noise and preserve cell feature details by learning the gradient information of the data. At the same time, to analyze scRNA-seq data with unknown prior information, we introduced the maximum eigenvalue method into the ATV-LRR model to automatically identify cell populations. The final clustering results show that the ATV-LRR model can detect cell types more effectively and stably.