SLRRSC: Single-Cell Type Recognition Method Based on Similarity and Graph Regularization Constraints

Single-cell clustering is a crucial task of scRNA-seq analysis, which reveals the natural grouping of cells. However, due to the high noise and high dimension in scRNA-seq data, how to effectively and accurately identify cell types from a great quantity of cell mixtures is still a challenge. Considering this, in this paper, we propose a novel subspace clustering algorithm termed SLRRSC. This method is developed based on the low-rank representation model, and it aims to capture the global and local properties inherent in data. In order to make the LRR matrix describe the spatial relationship of samples more accurately, we introduce the manifold-based graph regularization and similarity constraint into the LRR-based method SLRRSC. The graph regularization can preserve the local geometric structure of the data in low-rank decomposition, so that the low-rank representation matrix contains more local structure information. By imposing similarity constraint on the low-rank matrix, the similarity information between sample pairs is further introduced into the SLRRSC model to improve the learning ability of low-rank method for global structure. At the same time, the similarity constraint makes the low-rank representation matrix symmetric, which makes it better interpretable in clustering application. We compare the effectiveness of the SLRRSC algorithm with other single-cell clustering methods on simulated data and real single-cell datasets. The results show that this method can obtain more accurate sample similarity matrix and effectively solve the problem of cell type recognition.