LIGER2: Scalable Single-Cell Integration with On-Disk Datasets

Correcting batch effects and integrating single-cell sequencing datasets has been a crucial step in large-scale biological studies. Many methods have been published for this task, with complementary strengths in various scenarios. Our previous work, LIGER, leveraging integrative non-negative matrix factorization (iNMF), stands out in providing an interpretable low-dimensional representation. To adapt to the modern need for integrating millions of cells, we developed a highly-optimized parallel factorization solution with on-demand loading from disk. The upgraded LIGER algorithm shows significant improvements in time and memory efficiency for single-cell data integration. We also developed a new downstream embedding alignment method significantly improved performance in conserving biological variation while still aligning corresponding cell types across datasets.