Cited by 2,530Single-cell and spatial transcriptomicsGene expression and cancer classificationGene Regulatory Network Analysis

Deep generative modeling for single-cell transcriptomics

Open access
Lopez, Romain, Regier, Jeffrey, Cole, Michael B., Jordan, Michael I., Yosef, Nir·2018·Nature Methods

Published version of a preprint

Abstract

Single-cell transcriptome measurements can reveal unexplored biological diversity, but they suffer from technical noise and bias that must be modeled to account for the resulting uncertainty in downstream analyses. Here we introduce single-cell variational inference (scVI), a ready-to-use scalable framework for the probabilistic representation and analysis of gene expression in single cells ( https://github.com/YosefLab/scVI ). scVI uses stochastic optimization and deep neural networks to aggregate information across similar cells and genes and to approximate the distributions that underlie observed expression values, while accounting for batch effects and limited sensitivity. We used scVI for a range of fundamental analysis tasks including batch correction, visualization, clustering, and differential expression, and achieved high accuracy for each task.

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Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/s41592-018-0229-2

Cites

61 of 61 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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  • Both Harmony's and scVI's design inherently incorporates batch labels in its training process.

    “Importantly, both Harmony’s and scVI’s design inherently incorporates batch labels in its training process.”

    From Zero-shot evaluation reveals limitations of single-cell foundation models (2025) · cites this paper as [20]

    The Discussion (page not provided) says scVI explicitly accounts for batch annotations, and the Online Methods describe batch-dependent parameters in its model. Our copy does not address Harmony’s design or training, so it supports only the scVI part of the sentence. (LLM, conf=0.89)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Both scGPT and Geneformer produce cell embeddings intended to project potentially noisy gene expression measurements to a more biologically relevant latent space, and then these cell embeddings are fine-tuned for cell type classification.

    “Both scGPT and Geneformer produce cell embeddings intended to project potentially noisy gene expression measurements to a more biologically relevant latent space [18–21], and then these cell embeddings are fine-tuned for cell type classification.”

    From Zero-shot evaluation reveals limitations of single-cell foundation models (2025) · cites this paper as [20]

    The Results section (‘The scVI model: definition and preliminary evaluation’; page unavailable) describes representing noisy single-cell expression as a low-dimensional latent vector intended to better reflect biological differences between cells. That supports the general rationale for cell embeddings, but the paper describes scVI, not scGPT or Geneformer, so it does not establish that those named models produce embeddings for this purpose. The fine-tuning clause follows the citation and is not assessed as attributed to this source. (LLM, conf=0.87)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Zero-inflated autoencoders were introduced to handle data sparsity by employing a specialized loss function that aligns with the binomial distribution of single-cell data.

    “For instance, in scRNA-seq analysis, zero-inflated autoencoders were introduced to handle data sparsity by employing a specialized loss function that aligns with the binomial distribution of single-cell data [33].”

    From Challenges in AI-driven Biomedical Multimodal Data Fusion and Analysis (2025) · cites this paper as [33]

    The Online Methods (Modeling choices; page not specified) support using a zero-inflated likelihood to model sparsity in scRNA-seq data. But the paper specifies a zero-inflated negative binomial distribution, not a binomial distribution; its separate zero-inflation component is Bernoulli. (LLM, conf=0.88)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Multi-omics integration is a natural application area where specialized agents analyze transcriptomic, epigenomic, proteomic, and spatial datasets, reconciling heterogeneous signals through shared representation spaces.

    “Multi-omics integration represents another natural application area, where specialized agents analyze transcriptomic, epigenomic, proteomic, and spatial datasets, reconciling heterogeneous signals through shared representation spaces, a task particularly suited to foundation models capable of cross-modal alignment [12, 43, 44].”

    From The next paradigm in bioinformatics: a review of multi-agent systems and foundational models for end-to-end scientific discovery (2026) · cites this paper as [43]

    The Results section describes a low-dimensional mRNA latent space and compares cell similarity in that space with protein measurements. The Discussion says scVI could harmonize multiple datasets from a tissue. Neither passage describes specialized agents, integration of epigenomic or spatial data, or foundation-model cross-modal alignment; the protein measurements are used for evaluation, not integrated into the representation. (LLM, conf=0.88)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • 125 supertypes represented cell types that could be reliably reidentified in reference datasets (mean F1 score = 0.91) using hierarchical probabilistic Bayesian mapping.

    “To map SEA-AD data to cell types consistently across all 84 donors, we first defined robust transcriptional types, named supertypes, in the BICCN reference; 125 supertypes represented cell types that could be reliably reidentified in reference datasets (mean F1 score = 0.91) using hierarchical probabilistic Bayesian mapping47,48(Extended Data Fig. 5a,b).”

    From Integrated multimodal cell atlas of Alzheimer’s disease (2024) · cites this paper as [47]

    The Introduction describes scVI as a hierarchical Bayesian model for single-cell transcriptomics, supporting the citation’s description of the probabilistic method. The Discussion says merging datasets while integrating cell-type annotations is a possible extension, not a reference-mapping result demonstrated in this paper. The 125 supertypes and mean F1 score appear to be the citing authors’ results, rather than results attributed to this source. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Cites

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Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. [25]Kingma DP & Welling M Auto-encoding variational Bayes. In The International Conference on Learning Representations (2014).
  2. [27]Sønderby CK, Raiko T, Maaløe L, Sønderby SK & Winther O Ladder variational autoencoders. In Advances in Neural Information Pro- cessing Systems (2016).

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Authors
Lopez, R., Regier, J., Cole, M. B., Jordan, M. I., & Yosef, N.
Affiliations
  • University of California, Berkeley (US)
  • Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard (US)
Corresponding author
Yosef, Nir
Venue
Nature Methods
Published
2018-11-30
Volume
15
Issue
12
Pages
1053-1058
ISSN
  • 1548-7091 (ISSN-L)
  • 1548-7105
OpenAlex
W2901677030
Cited by
2,530
References
55
Citations by year
2026: 588 · 2025: 489 · 2024: 409 · 2023: 311 · 2022: 248 · 2021: 239 · 2020: 155 · 2019: 80 · 2018: 11
FWCI
43.21
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Nature Methods (publishedVersion)
  • bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
  • eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
Funders
  • Instituto de Ciencias del Mar y Limnología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
  • National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (R38AI140299, U19AI090023)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Gene expression and cancer classification
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Gene Regulatory Network Analysis
Keywords
single-cell transcriptomics, single-cell RNA sequencing, deep generative models, batch effect correction, differential gene expression, cell clustering, uncertainty quantification
MeSH terms
Algorithms, Animals, Brain, Hematopoietic Stem Cells, Humans, Leukocytes, Mononuclear, Models, Biological, Genetic Variation, Cluster Analysis, Sequence Analysis, RNA, Computational Biology, Mice, Single-Cell Analysis, High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing, Transcriptome

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