debCAM

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.

MPRAnalyze provides statistical framework for the analysis of data generated by Massively Parallel Reporter Assays (MPRAs), used to directly measure enhancer activity. MPRAnalyze can be used for quantification of enhancer activity, classification of active enhancers and comparative analyses of enhancer activity between conditions. MPRAnalyze construct a nested pair of generalized linear models (GLMs) to relate the DNA and RNA observations, easily adjustable to various experimental designs and conditions, and provides a set of rigorous statistical testig schemes.

TENET identifies key transcription factors (TFs) and regulatory elements (REs) linked to a specific cell type by finding significantly correlated differences in gene expression and RE DNA methylation between case and control input datasets, and identifying the top genes by number of significant RE DNA methylation site links. It also includes many tools for visualization and analysis of the results, including plots displaying and comparing methylation and expression data and methylation site link counts, survival analysis, TF motif searching in the vicinity of linked RE DNA methylation sites, custom TAD and peak overlap analysis, and UCSC Genome Browser track file generation. A utility function is also provided to download methylation, expression, and patient survival data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) for use in TENET or other analyses.

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.

BLASE is a method for finding where bulk RNA-seq data lies on a single-cell pseudotime trajectory. It uses a fast and understandable approach based on Spearman correlation, with bootstrapping to provide confidence. BLASE can be used to "date" bulk RNA-seq data, annotate cell types in scRNA-seq, and help correct for developmental phenotype differences in bulk RNA-seq experiments.

This package extends the function of the LiquidAssociation package for genome-wide application. It integrates a screening method into the LA analysis to reduce the number of triplets to be examined for a high LA value and provides code for use in subsequent significance analyses.