SCOT+: a comprehensive software suite for single-cell alignment using optimal transport

New advances in single-cell multi-omics experiments have allowed biologists to examine how various biological factors regulate processes in concert on the cellular level. However, measuring multiple cellular features for a single cell can be quite resource-intensive or impossible with the current technology. By using optimal transport (OT) to align cells and features across disparate datasets produced by separate assays, Single Cell alignment using Optimal Transport+ (SCOT+), our unsupervised single-cell alignment software suite, allows biologists to align their data without the need for any correspondence. SCOT+ implements a generic optimal transport solution that can be reduced to multiple different previously studied OT optimization procedures including SCOT, SCOTv2, SCOOTR, and AGW for single cell, each of which provides state-of-the-art single-cell alignment performance. Outside of giving a unified framework to interact with prior formulations, the generality of SCOT+ optimization naturally gives rise to a new OT loss, Unbalanced Augmented Gromov-Wasserstein (UAGW), and a corresponding optimizer. With our user-friendly website and tutorials, this new package will help improve biological analyses by allowing for more accurate downstream analyses on multi-omics single-cell measurements.

Our algorithm is implemented in Pytorch and available on PyPI and GitHub (https://github.com/scotplus/scotplus). Additionally, we have many tutorials available in a separate GitHub repository (https://github.com/scotplus/book_source) and on our website (https://scotplus.github.io/).