AUTHOR=Li Han , Wang Ying , Lai Yongxuan , Zeng Feng , Yang Fan TITLE=ProgClust: A progressive clustering method to identify cell populations JOURNAL=Frontiers in Genetics VOLUME=14 YEAR=2023 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genetics/articles/10.3389/fgene.2023.1183099 DOI=10.3389/fgene.2023.1183099 ISSN=1664-8021 ABSTRACT=

Identifying different types of cells in scRNA-seq data is a critical task in single-cell data analysis. In this paper, we propose a method called ProgClust for the decomposition of cell populations and detection of rare cells. ProgClust represents the single-cell data with clustering trees where a progressive searching method is designed to select cell population-specific genes and cluster cells. The obtained trees reveal the structure of both abundant cell populations and rare cell populations. Additionally, it can automatically determine the number of clusters. Experimental results show that ProgClust outperforms the baseline method and is capable of accurately identifying both common and rare cells. Moreover, when applied to real unlabeled data, it reveals potential cell subpopulations which provides clues for further exploration. In summary, ProgClust shows potential in identifying subpopulations of complex single-cell data.