scNCL: transferring labels from scRNA-seq to scATAC-seq data with neighborhood contrastive regularization

scATAC-seq has enabled chromatin accessibility landscape profiling at the single-cell level, providing opportunities for determining cell-type-specific regulation codes. However, high dimension, extreme sparsity, and large scale of scATAC-seq data have posed great challenges to cell-type identification. Thus, there has been a growing interest in leveraging the well-annotated scRNA-seq data to help annotate scATAC-seq data. However, substantial computational obstacles remain to transfer information from scRNA-seq to scATAC-seq, especially for their heterogeneous features.

We propose a new transfer learning method, scNCL, which utilizes prior knowledge and contrastive learning to tackle the problem of heterogeneous features. Briefly, scNCL transforms scATAC-seq features into gene activity matrix based on prior knowledge. Since feature transformation can cause information loss, scNCL introduces neighborhood contrastive learning to preserve the neighborhood structure of scATAC-seq cells in raw feature space. To learn transferable latent features, scNCL uses a feature projection loss and an alignment loss to harmonize embeddings between scRNA-seq and scATAC-seq. Experiments on various datasets demonstrated that scNCL not only realizes accurate and robust label transfer for common types, but also achieves reliable detection of novel types. scNCL is also computationally efficient and scalable to million-scale datasets. Moreover, we prove scNCL can help refine cell-type annotations in existing scATAC-seq atlases.

The source code and data used in this paper can be found in https://github.com/CSUBioGroup/scNCL-release.