Denoising adaptive deep clustering with self-attention mechanism on single-cell sequencing data

A large number of works have presented the single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) to study the diversity and biological functions of cells at the single-cell level. Clustering identifies unknown cell types, which is essential for downstream analysis of scRNA-seq samples. However, the high dimensionality, high noise and pervasive dropout rate of scRNA-seq samples have a significant challenge to the cluster analysis of scRNA-seq samples. Herein, we propose a new adaptive fuzzy clustering model based on the denoising autoencoder and self-attention mechanism called the scDASFK. It implements the comparative learning to integrate cell similar information into the clustering method and uses a deep denoising network module to denoise the data. scDASFK consists of a self-attention mechanism for further denoising where an adaptive clustering optimization function for iterative clustering is implemented. In order to make the denoised latent features better reflect the cell structure, we introduce a new adaptive feedback mechanism to supervise the denoising process through the clustering results. Experiments on 16 real scRNA-seq datasets show that scDASFK performs well in terms of clustering accuracy, scalability and stability. Overall, scDASFK is an effective clustering model with great potential for scRNA-seq samples analysis. Our scDASFK model codes are freely available at https://github.com/LRX2022/scDASFK.