Abstract
Single-cell RNA-sequencing is a rapidly evolving technology that enables us to understand biological processes at unprecedented resolution. Single-cell expression analysis requires a complex data processing pipeline, and the pipeline is divided into two main parts: The quantification part, which converts the sequence information into gene-cell matrix data; the analysis part, which analyzes the matrix data using statistics and/or machine learning techniques. In the analysis part, unsupervised cell clustering plays an important role in identifying cell types and discovering cell diversity and subpopulations. Identified cell clusters are also used for subsequent analysis, such as finding differentially expressed genes and inferring cell trajectories. However, single-cell clustering using gene expression profiles shows different results depending on the quantification methods. Clustering results are greatly affected by the quantification method used in the upstream process. In other words, even if the original RNA-sequence data is the same, gene expression profiles processed by different quantification methods will produce different clusters. In this article, we propose a robust and highly accurate clustering method based on joint non-negative matrix factorization (joint-NMF) by utilizing the information from multiple gene expression profiles quantified using different methods from the same RNA-sequence data. Our joint-NMF can extract common factors among multiple gene expression profiles by applying each NMF under the constraint that one of the factorized matrices is shared among multiple NMFs. The joint-NMF determines more robust and accurate cell clustering results by leveraging multiple quantification methods compared to conventional clustering methods, which use only a single gene expression profile. Additionally, we showed the usefulness of discovering marker genes with the extracted features using our method.