The impacts of active and self-supervised learning on efficient annotation of single-cell expression data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A crucial step in the analysis of single-cell data is annotating cells to cell types and states. While a myriad of approaches has been proposed, manual labeling of cells to create training datasets remains tedious and time-consuming. In the field of machine learning, active and self-supervised learning methods have been proposed to improve the performance of a classifier while reducing both annotation time and label budget. However, the benefits of such strategies for single-cell annotation have yet to be evaluated in realistic settings. Here, we perform a comprehensive benchmarking of active and self-supervised labeling strategies across a range of single-cell technologies and cell type annotation algorithms. We quantify the benefits of active learning and self-supervised strategies in the presence of cell type imbalance and variable similarity. We introduce adaptive reweighting, a heuristic procedure tailored to single-cell data-including a marker-aware version-that shows competitive performance with existing approaches. In addition, we demonstrate that having prior knowledge of cell type markers improves annotation accuracy. Finally, we summarize our findings into a set of recommendations for those implementing cell type annotation procedures or platforms. An R package implementing the heuristic approaches introduced in this work may be found at https://github.com/camlab-bioml/leader .
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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 | 0.017 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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".