---
title: "MetaNeighbor : a method to rapidly assess cell type identity using both functional and random gene sets"
author: "Megan Crow, Sara Ballouz, Manthan Shah, Jesse Gillis"
date: '`r Sys.Date()`'
output:
pdf_document:
fig_caption: yes
number_sections: yes
toc: yes
toc_depth: 6
bibliography: MetaNeighbor.bib
graphics: yes
vignette: >
%\VignetteIndexEntry{MetaNeighbor user guide}
%\VignettePackage{MetaNeighbor}
%\VignetteEncoding{UTF-8}
%\VignetteEngine{knitr::rmarkdown}
---
# Introduction
The purpose of this method is to measure the similarity of cells across single
cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) datasets by sampling from both random and
functionally defined gene sets. MetaNeighbor works on the basis that cells of
the same type should have more similar gene expression profiles than cells of
different types. In other words, when we compare the expression profile between
T cells and hepatocytes for a given gene set, we should see higher correlations
among all T cells than we do between T cells and hepatocytes. This is
illustrated in the schematic below:
Figure 1. A. Relationship between gene set expression and cell type B. Cell
similarity within and across cell types
In our approach, this is formalized through neighbor voting based on cell-cell
similarities, which will be described in detail in the Methods section. In
short, MetaNeighbor takes four inputs: a gene-by-sample expression matrix
("data"), a set of labels indicating each sample's dataset of origin
("experiment labels"), a set of labels indicating each sample's cell type
("cell type labels") and a set of genes ("gene sets"). The output is a
performance vector ("AUROC scores"), which is the mean area under the receiver
operator characteristic curve (AUROC) for the given task. This score reflects
our ability to rank cells of the same known type higher than those of other
types within a dataset, and can be interpreted as the probability that we will
be correct about making a binary classification for a given cell (e.g. neuron
vs. non-neuronal cell). An AUROC score of 0.5 means that we have performed as
well as if we had randomly guessed the cell's identity.
This is a fully supervised analysis, and requires knowledge of the corresponding
cell types across datasets. However, we have also used some heuristic measures
to identify cell types across datasets when labels may be ambiguous or
uninformative. We will walk through this exploratory analysis in Part 2 of the
vignette.
# Data type requirements
For MetaNeighbor to run, the input data should be a SummarizedExperiment object
(SEO) with the following considerations:
1. The gene-by-sample matrix should be an assay of SEO.
2. Gene sets of interest should be provided as a list of vectors.
3. Additional data should have following vectors:
i. **`sample_id`**: A character vector (length equal to the number of samples)
containing a unique identifier for each sample.
ii. **`study_id`**: A character vector (length equal to the number of samples)
that indicates the source of each sample (ex."GSE60361" = Zeisel et al,
"GSE71585" = Tasic et al, as in mn_data).
iii. **`cell_type`**: A character vector (length equal to the number of
samples) that indicates the cell type of each sample.
4. **`cell_labels`** should be provided as a sample-by-cell label matrix. This
should be a binary (0,1) matrix where 1 indicates cell type membership and 0
indicates non-membership.
Additional requirements to be noted:
1. It is critical that genes within gene sets match the gene names of the
expression matrix.
2. Gene sets should contain more than one gene.
3. The row names of the **`cell_labels`** object should match the column names
of the expression matrix.
# System requirements/estimated run times
Because there is a ranking step, the code is not ideal for scaling in the R
environment as is. The major factor is the total number of samples. Speed-ups
are possible with parallelization and installing libraries such as MRAN
().
Laptop (OSX 10.10.4, 1.6 GHz, 8GB RAM, R 3.3.2, Rstudio 0.99.446)
| Experiments| Cell types| Samples| Gene sets| Time (s)|
|------------:|-----------:|--------:|----------:|---------:|
| 2| 1| 100| 10| 0.1|
| 2| 10| 100| 10| 0.5|
| 2| 10| 100| 100| 1.7|
| 2| 10| 100| 1000| 17.5|
| 2| 1| 1000| 10| 9|
| 10| 1| 1000| 10| 9|
| 2| 10| 1000| 10| 12|
| 2| 10| 1000| 100| 93|
| 2| 10| 1000| 1000| 979|
| 2| 10| 10000| 10| 3653|
# Installation
Install the MetaNeighbor package by running the following command:
```r
if (!require('devtools')) {
install.packages('devtools', quiet=TRUE)
}
devtools::install_git('https://github.com/gillislab/MetaNeighbor')
```
# Methods
MetaNeighbor runs as follows: first, we build a network of rank correlations
between all cells for a gene set. All values in the network are then re-ranked
and standardized to lie between 0-1. Next, the neighbor voting predictor
produces a weighted matrix of predicted labels by performing matrix
multiplication between the network and the binary vector indicating cell type
membership, then dividing each element by the null predictor (i.e., node degree).
That is, each cell is given a score equal to the fraction of its neighbors
(including itself), which are part of a given cell type. For cross-validation,
we permute through all possible combinations of leave-one-dataset-out
cross-validation, and we report how well we can recover cells of the same type
as area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (AUROC). This is
repeated for all folds of cross-validation, and the mean AUROC across folds is
reported.
## Part 1: Supervised MetaNeighbor
### Quick start
To run through the analysis and plot results, load the package and run the following commands:
``` r
library(MetaNeighbor)
library(SummarizedExperiment)
data(mn_data)
data(GOmouse)
AUROC_scores = MetaNeighbor(dat = mn_data,
experiment_labels = as.numeric(factor(mn_data$study_id)),
celltype_labels = metadata(colData(mn_data))[["cell_labels"]],
genesets = GOmouse,
bplot = TRUE)
```
### More detail
We have provided sample data and sample gene sets within the MetaNeighbor
package. In this sample data, we have included the cortical interneurons from
two public datasets, GSE60361 and GSE71585 (RPKM). A subset of ~3000 genes and 10 genesets have been included for demonstration. For this example, we will be
testing how well we can identify the Sst Chodl subtype (Sst-Chodl from GSE71585
and Int1 from GSE60361) and the Smad3 subtype (Smad3 from GSE71585 and Int14
from GSE60361), relative to all other interneurons within their respective
experiments.
MetaNeighbor requires a SummarizedExperimentObject as input, formatted as
specified above.
There are two outputs of the method:
1. A matrix of AUROC scores representing the mean for each gene set tested for
each celltype
2. A beanplot displaying density of AUROC scores for each cell type (by default
the plot will be displayed and can be turned off by setting the argument **`bplot=FALSE`**)
#### Load package and data
To run through the analysis, run the following commands:
``` {r eval = TRUE, message=FALSE}
library(MetaNeighbor)
library(SummarizedExperiment)
data(mn_data)
data(GOmouse)
```
#### Run MetaNeighbor and plot results
As MetaNeighbor runs, it outputs the name of the gene set that is being
evaluated. When all gene sets have been tested, MetaNeighbor will return a gene
set-by-cell type matrix of AUROC scores. A smoothed distribution of scores for
each cell type will be plotted by default (turn off plotting by setting
**`bplot= FALSE`**). Short horizontal lines inside the shape indicate AUROC values
for individual gene sets, and the large horizontal line represents the mean.
``` {r eval=TRUE,fig.width=4,fig.height=3, results='hide'}
AUROC_scores = MetaNeighbor(dat = mn_data,
experiment_labels = as.numeric(factor(mn_data$study_id)),
celltype_labels = metadata(colData(mn_data))[["cell_labels"]],
genesets = GOmouse,
bplot = TRUE)
```
```{r eval= TRUE}
head(AUROC_scores)
```
AUROC scores greater than 0.5 indicate improvement over randomly guessing the
identity of the cell type of interest.
## Part 2: MetaNeighbor for Data Exploration
### Quick start
To run through the analysis and plot results run the following commands:
``` r
library(MetaNeighbor)
data(mn_data)
var_genes = variableGenes(dat = mn_data, exp_labels = mn_data$study_id)
celltype_NV = MetaNeighborUS(var_genes = var_genes,
dat = mn_data,
study_id = mn_data$study_id,
cell_type = mn_data$cell_type)
top_hits = topHits(cell_NV = celltype_NV,
dat = mn_data,
study_id = mn_data$study_id,
cell_type = mn_data$cell_type,
threshold = 0.9)
top_hits
cols = rev(colorRampPalette(RColorBrewer::brewer.pal(11,"RdYlBu"))(100))
breaks = seq(0, 1, length=101)
gplots::heatmap.2(celltype_NV,
margins=c(8,8),
keysize=1,
key.xlab="AUROC",
key.title="NULL",
trace = "none",
density.info = "none",
col = cols,
breaks = breaks,
offsetRow=0.1,
offsetCol=0.1,
cexRow = 0.7,
cexCol = 0.7)
```
### More detail
While ideally we would like to perform supervised analyses to investigate cell
type identity, in some cases it is difficult to know how cell type labels
compare across datasets. For this situation, we came up with a heuristic to
allow researchers to make an educated guess about overlaps without requiring
in-depth knowledge of marker genes. This was based on our observation that
large, high variance gene sets tended to provide improved scores for known cell
types.
Exploratory Metaneighbor requires an input SEO as specified above, as well as a
vector containing a set of variable genes (`var_genes`). The function will use
the set of variable genes to create a cell-cell similarity network.
The output of the function is a cell type-by-cell type mean AUROC matrix, which
is built by treating each pair of cell types as testing and training data for
MetaNeighbor, then taking the average AUROC for each pair (NB AUROC scores
across testing and training folds will not be identical because each test cell
type is scored out of its own dataset, and differences in dataset heterogeneity
influence scores). When comparing datasets that contained similar cell types, we
found that cell types that were the best hit for one another ("reciprocal top
hits"), and cell types with scores >0.9 tended to be good candidates for
downstream tests of cell type identity using Supervised MetaNeighbor. This rule
will not hold when experiments contain wholly different cell types (e.g.,
comparing brain to pancreas will likely yield some spurious overlaps), or when
datasets are very unbalanced with respect to one another.
#### Load package and data
We have provided sample data and source code [here](https://github.com/gillislab/MetaNeighbor).To begin the analysis, simply load the package from the above link into your R session.
```{r eval = TRUE}
library(MetaNeighbor)
data(mn_data)
```
#### Identify a highly variable gene set
To begin, we will use the function variableGenes, which picks the top
quartile of variable genes across all but the top decile of expression bins for
each dataset, then provides the intersect across datasets as the output.
``` {r eval = TRUE}
var_genes = variableGenes(dat = mn_data, exp_labels = mn_data$study_id)
head(var_genes)
```
``` {r eval = TRUE}
length(var_genes)
```
In this case, we return a set of 331 highly variable genes. AUROC scores depend
on both gene set size and variance. If the size of the returned set is small
(<200 genes) the suggested AUROC cut-off of >0.9 may not be applicable, and it
may be helpful to increase the gene set size. This may be done by taking a
majority rule on genes included in the highly variable sets of each dataset in
the analysis (i.e., include a gene if it is highly variable in >50% of datasets)
. This strategy is likely to be required with an increasing number of datasets
included. However, we note that if few genes are returned when using a small
number of datasets (2-3), this may indicate that the datasets have different
cell type compositions, or have very different gene coverage. Under these
circumstances, we do not recommend the use of MetaNeighbor.
#### Run MetaNeighbor for data exploration
Once we have a set of highly variable genes, we can simply run an exploratory
version of MetaNeighbor using the function:
``` {r eval=TRUE}
celltype_NV = MetaNeighborUS(var_genes = var_genes,
dat = mn_data,
study_id = mn_data$study_id,
cell_type = mn_data$cell_type)
```
#### Plot results
Results can be plotted as follows:
``` {r eval=TRUE,fig.width=7,fig.height=6.5}
cols = rev(colorRampPalette(RColorBrewer::brewer.pal(11,"RdYlBu"))(100))
breaks = seq(0, 1, length=101)
gplots::heatmap.2(celltype_NV,
margins=c(8,8),
keysize=1,
key.xlab="AUROC",
key.title="NULL",
trace = "none",
density.info = "none",
col = cols,
breaks = breaks,
offsetRow=0.1,
offsetCol=0.1,
cexRow = 0.7,
cexCol = 0.7)
```
This plot shows the AUROC scores between each testing and training pair. Red
indicates a higher score and blue indicates a lower score. Note that the
diagonal is not equal to one. This is because of the scoring system: cell types
that are 'promiscuous' (i.e., have broad similarity to many types) will tend to
have higher node degrees in the network. Differences in degree across cell types
will affect scores as predictions are standardized by this factor.
Within-dataset scores are shown for visualization purposes only, and should not
be used for replicability inference.
#### Identify reciprocal top hits and high scoring cell type pairs
To find reciprocal top hits and those with AUROC>0.9 we use the following
code:
```{r eval = TRUE}
top_hits = topHits(cell_NV = celltype_NV,
dat = mn_data,
study_id = mn_data$study_id,
cell_type = mn_data$cell_type,
threshold = 0.9)
top_hits
```
These top hits can then be used for supervised analysis, making putative cell
type labels for each unique grouping (see Part 1).
# FAQ and Contact Information
* If you use this package, please cite [Crow et al (2018) Nature Communications](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03282-0).
* Data files used in Crow et al (2018) may be accessed [here](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9std53hcyafke2c/AAAuwjcOvKSrlZABRJVqVF_pa?dl=0).
* A development version of MetaNeighbor was first available [here](https://github.com/maggiecrow/MetaNeighbor) (2016) but is no longer maintained.
* For any assistance reproducing analyses please contact mcrow@cshl.edu or
jgillis@cshl.edu .