FeatPCA: A feature subspace based principal component analysis technique for enhancing clustering of single-cell RNA-seq data

Abstract

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has revolutionized our ability to analyze gene expression at the cellular level. By providing data on gene expression for each individual cell, scRNA-seq generates large datasets with thousands of genes. However, handling such high-dimensional data poses computational challenges due to increased complexity. Dimensionality reduction becomes crucial for scRNA-seq analysis. Various dimensionality reduction algorithms, including Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP), and t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE), are commonly used to address this challenge. These methods transform the original high-dimensional data into a lower-dimensional representation while preserving relevant information. In this paper we propose {\methodname}. Instead of applying dimensionality reduction directly to the entire dataset, we divide it into multiple subspaces. Within each subspace, we apply dimension reduction techniques, and then merge the reduced data. {\methodname} offers four variations for subspacing. Our experimental results demonstrate that clustering based on subspacing yields better accuracy than working with the full dataset. Across a variety of scRNA-seq datasets, {\methodname} consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art clustering tools.