More accurate estimation of cell composition in bulk expression through robust integration of single-cell information

The rapid single-cell transcriptomic technology developments have led to an increasing interest in cellular heterogeneity within cell populations. Although cell-type proportions can be obtained directly from single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), it is costly and not feasible in every study. Alternatively, with fewer experimental complications, cell-type compositions are characterized from bulk RNA-seq data. Many computational tools have been developed and reported in the literature. However, they fail to appropriately incorporate the covariance structures in both scRNA-seq and bulk RNA-seq datasets in use.

We present a covariance-based single-cell decomposition (CSCD) method that estimates cell-type proportions in bulk data through building a reference expression profile based on a single-cell data, and learning gene-specific bulk expression transformations using a constrained linear inverse model. The approach is similar to Bisque, a cell-type decomposition method that was recently developed. Bisque is limited to a univariate model, thus unable to incorporate gene-gene correlations into the analysis. We introduce a more advanced model that successfully incorporates the covariance structures in both scRNA-seq and bulk RNA-seq datasets into the analysis, and fixes the collinearity issue by utilizing a linear shrinkage estimation of the corresponding covariance matrices. We applied CSCD to several publicly available datasets and measured the performance of CSCD, Bisque and six other common methods in the literature. Our results indicate that CSCD is more accurate and comprehensive than most of the existing methods.

The R package is available on https://github.com/empiricalbayes/CSCDRNA.