A Systematic Evaluation of Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms for Cell Phenotype Classification Using Single-Cell RNA Sequencing Data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The new technology of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) can yield valuable insights into gene expression and give critical information about the cellular compositions of complex tissues. In recent years, vast numbers of scRNA-seq datasets have been generated and made publicly available, and this has enabled researchers to train supervised machine learning models for predicting or classifying various cell-level phenotypes. This has led to the development of many new methods for analyzing scRNA-seq data. Despite the popularity of such applications, there has as yet been no systematic investigation of the performance of these supervised algorithms using predictors from various sizes of scRNA-seq datasets. In this study, 13 popular supervised machine learning algorithms for cell phenotype classification were evaluated using published real and simulated datasets with diverse cell sizes. This benchmark comprises two parts. In the first, real datasets were used to assess the computing speed and cell phenotype classification performance of popular supervised algorithms. The classification performances were evaluated using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, F1-score, Precision, Recall, and false-positive rate. In the second part, we evaluated gene-selection performance using published simulated datasets with a known list of real genes. The results showed that ElasticNet with interactions performed the best for small and medium-sized datasets. The NaiveBayes classifier was found to be another appropriate method for medium-sized datasets. With large datasets, the performance of the XGBoost algorithm was found to be excellent. Ensemble algorithms were not found to be significantly superior to individual machine learning methods. Including interactions in the ElasticNet algorithm caused a significant performance improvement for small datasets. The linear discriminant analysis algorithm was found to be the best choice when speed is critical; it is the fastest method, it can scale to handle large sample sizes, and its performance is not much worse than the top performers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".