Cited by 1,065Single-cell and spatial transcriptomicsTopological and Geometric Data AnalysisData Visualization and Analytics

Visualizing structure and transitions in high-dimensional biological data

Open access
Moon, Kevin R., van Dijk, David, Wang, Zheng, Gigante, Scott, Burkhardt, Daniel B., Chen, William S., Yim, Kristina, Elzen, Antonia van den +5 more·2019·Nature Biotechnology

Published version of a preprint

Abstract

The high-dimensional data created by high-throughput technologies require visualization tools that reveal data structure and patterns in an intuitive form. We present PHATE, a visualization method that captures both local and global nonlinear structure using an information-geometric distance between data points. We compare PHATE to other tools on a variety of artificial and biological datasets, and find that it consistently preserves a range of patterns in data, including continual progressions, branches and clusters, better than other tools. We define a manifold preservation metric, which we call denoised embedding manifold preservation (DEMaP), and show that PHATE produces lower-dimensional embeddings that are quantitatively better denoised as compared to existing visualization methods. An analysis of a newly generated single-cell RNA sequencing dataset on human germ-layer differentiation demonstrates how PHATE reveals unique biological insight into the main developmental branches, including identification of three previously undescribed subpopulations. We also show that PHATE is applicable to a wide variety of data types, including mass cytometry, single-cell RNA sequencing, Hi-C and gut microbiome data.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/s41587-019-0336-3

Cites

80 of 80 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Dimensionality reduction methods such as PHATE and Multiscale PHATE can learn abstract representations of biological and clinical data at different levels of granularity, and have been shown to predict clinical outcomes in people with COVID-19.

    “Another approach is dimensionality reduction, including novel methods such as PHATE and Multiscale PHATE, which can learn abstract representations of biological and clinical data at different levels of granularity, and have been shown to predict clinical outcomes, for example, in people with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) 21,22 .”

    From Multimodal biomedical AI (2022) · cites this paper as [21]

    Split into 2 atoms — 0 confirmed, 2 partially supported, 0 disputed, 0 misattributed, 0 unverifiable. Expand the claim to see per-atom verdicts.

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • The cellular transcriptomic state space can be modeled as a smooth, low-dimensional manifold or a set of manifolds.

    “We begin by modeling the cellular transcriptomic state space as a smooth, low-dimensional manifold or set of manifolds.”

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. [11]Moon TK and Stirling WC, Mathematical methods and algorithms for signal processing. Prentice Hall, 2000.
  2. [59]Butterworth S, “ On the theory of filter amplifiers,” Wireless Engineer, vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 536– 541, 1930.
  3. [64]Salicrú M, Sanchez A, Conde J, and Sanchez P, “ Entropy measures associated with K and M divergences,” Soochow Journal of Mathematics, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 291– 298, 1995.
  4. [67]Yang T, Liu J, McMillan L, and Wang W, “ A fast approximation to multidimensional scaling,” in IEEE Workshop on Computation Intensive Methods for Computer Vision, 2006.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Moon, K. R., van Dijk, D., Wang, Z., Gigante, S., Burkhardt, D. B., Chen, W. S., Yim, K., Elzen, A. V. D., Hirn, M. J., Coifman, R. R., Ivanova, N. B., Wolf, G., & Krishnaswamy, S.
Affiliations
  • Utah State University (US)
  • Qingdao University (CN)
  • Yale University (US)
  • Michigan State University (US)
  • University of Georgia (US)
  • Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute (CA)
Corresponding author
  • Ivanova, Natalia B.
  • Wolf, Guy
  • Krishnaswamy, Smita
Venue
Nature Biotechnology
Published
2019-12
Volume
37
Issue
12
Pages
1482-1492
ISSN
  • 0733-222X (ISSN-L)
  • 1087-0156
  • 1546-1696
OpenAlex
W2993894543
Cited by
1,065
References
79
Citations by year
2026: 167 · 2025: 213 · 2024: 175 · 2023: 166 · 2022: 141 · 2021: 133 · 2020: 58 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 1 · 2013: 1
FWCI
28.38
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Nature Biotechnology (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
Funders
  • Gruber Foundation
  • U.S. Department of Health & Human Services | NIH | Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (F31HD097958)
  • Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (FG-2016-6607)
  • United States Department of Defense | Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (D16AP00117)
  • U.S. Department of Health & Human Services | National Institutes of Health (1R01HG008383, R01GM107092, R01GM130847)
  • l’institut de valorisation des donnees
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computational Theory and Mathematics › Topological and Geometric Data Analysis
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Data Visualization and Analytics
Keywords
PHATE, high-dimensional data visualization, nonlinear structures, single-cell RNA sequencing, developmental trajectories, subpopulation identification, mass cytometry, Hi-C, gut microbiota, high-throughput biological data
MeSH terms
Gastrointestinal Microbiome, Big Data, Algorithms, Animals, Cell Differentiation, Cells, Cultured, Computer Simulation, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Sequence Analysis, RNA, Genomics, Databases, Genetic, Mice, High-Throughput Screening Assays, Single-Cell Analysis

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review