Mixture-of-Experts Variational Autoencoder for clustering and generating from similarity-based representations on single cell data

PLoS Comput Biol. 2021 Jun 30;17(6):e1009086. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009086. eCollection 2021 Jun.

Abstract

Clustering high-dimensional data, such as images or biological measurements, is a long-standing problem and has been studied extensively. Recently, Deep Clustering has gained popularity due to its flexibility in fitting the specific peculiarities of complex data. Here we introduce the Mixture-of-Experts Similarity Variational Autoencoder (MoE-Sim-VAE), a novel generative clustering model. The model can learn multi-modal distributions of high-dimensional data and use these to generate realistic data with high efficacy and efficiency. MoE-Sim-VAE is based on a Variational Autoencoder (VAE), where the decoder consists of a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. This specific architecture allows for various modes of the data to be automatically learned by means of the experts. Additionally, we encourage the lower dimensional latent representation of our model to follow a Gaussian mixture distribution and to accurately represent the similarities between the data points. We assess the performance of our model on the MNIST benchmark data set and challenging real-world tasks of clustering mouse organs from single-cell RNA-sequencing measurements and defining cell subpopulations from mass cytometry (CyTOF) measurements on hundreds of different datasets. MoE-Sim-VAE exhibits superior clustering performance on all these tasks in comparison to the baselines as well as competitor methods.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Computational Biology
  • Deep Learning
  • Gene Expression Profiling / statistics & numerical data
  • Leukocytes, Mononuclear / classification
  • Mice
  • Models, Biological
  • Normal Distribution
  • Organ Specificity
  • Phenotype
  • RNA-Seq / statistics & numerical data
  • Single-Cell Analysis / statistics & numerical data*

Grants and funding

AK is supported by the “SystemsX.ch HDL-X” and “ERASysApp Rootbook” and PHRT 2017-103. VF is supported by a PhD fellowship from the Swiss Data Science Center and by the PHRT grant #2017-110 of the ETH Domain. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.