scCorrector: a robust method for integrating multi-study single-cell data

The advent of single-cell sequencing technologies has revolutionized cell biology studies. However, integrative analyses of diverse single-cell data face serious challenges, including technological noise, sample heterogeneity, and different modalities and species. To address these problems, we propose scCorrector, a variational autoencoder-based model that can integrate single-cell data from different studies and map them into a common space. Specifically, we designed a Study Specific Adaptive Normalization for each study in decoder to implement these features. scCorrector substantially achieves competitive and robust performance compared with state-of-the-art methods and brings novel insights under various circumstances (e.g. various batches, multi-omics, cross-species, and development stages). In addition, the integration of single-cell data and spatial data makes it possible to transfer information between different studies, which greatly expand the narrow range of genes covered by MERFISH technology. In summary, scCorrector can efficiently integrate multi-study single-cell datasets, thereby providing broad opportunities to tackle challenges emerging from noisy resources.