BIOS Seminar: Transfer Learning

Nancy Zhang, PhD, professor of statistics at the University of Pennsylvania, will present this week’s biostatistics seminar titled “Transfer Learning in Single Cell Transcriptomics.”

Abstract:

Cells are the basic biological units of multicellular organisms. The development of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies have enabled us to study the diversity of cell types in tissue and to elucidate the roles of individual cell types in disease. Yet, scRNA-seq data are noisy and sparse, with only a small proportion of the transcripts that are present in each cell represented in the final data matrix. We propose SAVER-X, a transfer learning framework to borrow information across related single cell data sets for de-noising and expression recovery. Our goal is to leverage the expanding resources of publicly available scRNA-seq data, for example, the Human Cell Atlas which aims to be a comprehensive map of cell types in the human body. Our method is based on a Bayesian hierarchical model coupled to a deep autoencoder, the latter trained to extract transferable gene expression features across studiescoming from different labs, generated by different technologies, and/or obtained from different species. Through this framework, we explore the limits of data sharing: How much can be learned across cell types, tissues, and species? How useful are data from other technologies and labs in improving the estimates from your own study?