EAAI Journal 2025 Journal Article
A single-cell RNA sequencing data imputation method based on non-negative matrix factorization and multi-kernel similarity network fusion
- Pei Liu
- Cheng Chen
- Hao Liu
- Jin Gu
- Xinya Chen
- Ying Su
- Zhiyuan Cheng
- Xiaoyi Lv
Artificial intelligence-based single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology is widely used in cell type identification and disease research, but its data often contain a large number of missing values and zero values due to technical limitations and biological differences. These zero values not only affect downstream analysis, but also make it difficult to distinguish technical zero values from biological zero values. Therefore, this paper proposes a scRNA-seq data interpolation method (sc-MKNMF) based on non-negative matrix factorization and multi-kernel similarity network fusion for the first time. This method improves the accuracy of cell clustering by accurately filling some zero values. First, sc-MKNMF uses gene-cell dual-level analysis to distinguish technical zero values from biological zero values, and then calculates the similarity network of multi-kernel fusion of genes and cells respectively. Then, this method uses non-negative matrix factorization combined with similarity network to construct the objective function, and introduces sparse regularization terms to ensure the similarity between genes and cells and improve stability. In addition, sc-MKNMF is also equipped with an efficient optimization algorithm to promote its convergence by continuously updating the objective function. Finally, the verification and comparative experiments on 12 scRNA-seq datasets show that the sc-MKNMF method outperforms other advanced data interpolation methods. In addition, the extension of sc-MKNMF to the two tasks of cell trajectory inference and differentially expressed gene analysis showed significant improvement and excellent versatility.