mfa

Single-cell mRNA sequencing can uncover novel cell-to-cell heterogeneity in gene expression levels in seemingly homogeneous populations of cells. However, these experiments are prone to high levels of technical noise, creating new challenges for identifying genes that show genuine heterogeneous expression within the population of cells under study. BASiCS (Bayesian Analysis of Single-Cell Sequencing data) is an integrated Bayesian hierarchical model to perform statistical analyses of single-cell RNA sequencing datasets in the context of supervised experiments (where the groups of cells of interest are known a priori, e.g. experimental conditions or cell types). BASiCS performs built-in data normalisation (global scaling) and technical noise quantification (based on spike-in genes). BASiCS provides an intuitive detection criterion for highly (or lowly) variable genes within a single group of cells. Additionally, BASiCS can compare gene expression patterns between two or more pre-specified groups of cells. Unlike traditional differential expression tools, BASiCS quantifies changes in expression that lie beyond comparisons of means, also allowing the study of changes in cell-to-cell heterogeneity. The latter can be quantified via a biological over-dispersion parameter that measures the excess of variability that is observed with respect to Poisson sampling noise, after normalisation and technical noise removal. Due to the strong mean/over-dispersion confounding that is typically observed for scRNA-seq datasets, BASiCS also tests for changes in residual over-dispersion, defined by residual values with respect to a global mean/over-dispersion trend.

The BPRMeth package is a probabilistic method to quantify explicit features of methylation profiles, in a way that would make it easier to formally use such profiles in downstream modelling efforts, such as predicting gene expression levels or clustering genomic regions or cells according to their methylation profiles.

Differential expression analysis of sequence count data. Implements a range of statistical methodology based on the negative binomial distributions, including empirical Bayes estimation, exact tests, generalized linear models, quasi-likelihood, and gene set enrichment. Can perform differential analyses of any type of omics data that produces read counts, including RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, Bisulfite-seq, SAGE, CAGE, metabolomics, or proteomics spectral counts. RNA-seq analyses can be conducted at the gene or isoform level, and tests can be conducted for differential exon or transcript usage.

PhenoPath infers genomic trajectories (pseudotimes) in the presence of heterogeneous genetic and environmental backgrounds and tests for interactions between them.

Provides an interface to infer the parameters of BASiCS using the variational inference (ADVI), Markov chain Monte Carlo (NUTS), and maximum a posteriori (BFGS) inference engines in the Stan programming language. BASiCS is a Bayesian hierarchical model that uses an adaptive Metropolis within Gibbs sampling scheme. Alternative inference methods provided by Stan may be preferable in some situations, for example for particularly large data or posterior distributions with difficult geometries.

Melissa is a Baysian probabilistic model for jointly clustering and imputing single cell methylomes. This is done by taking into account local correlations via a Generalised Linear Model approach and global similarities using a mixture modelling approach.