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Record W4408748660 · doi:10.23977/acss.2025.090112

A Review of scRNA-seq Imputation Methods

2025· review· en· W4408748660 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueAdvances in Computer Signals and Systems · 2025
Typereview
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicCancer-related molecular mechanisms research
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersYunnan Normal University
KeywordsImputation (statistics)Computer scienceMissing dataMachine learning

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has emerged as a powerful tool for profiling gene expression at the individual cell level, enabling the discovery of cellular heterogeneity that traditional bulk RNA sequencing cannot capture. However, technical limitations such as low transcript capture efficiency, amplification biases, and limited sequencing depth have led to pervasive dropout events, where true gene expression is obscured by excessive zero counts. This review systematically examines and compares the principal imputation methods developed to address these challenges in scRNA-seq data analysis. We categorize these approaches into two broad groups: model-based methods and deep learning methods. Model-based techniques utilize probabilistic models or matrix factorization to exploit similarities among cells and genes—either independently or in combination—to predict and restore missing values. In contrast, deep learning methods leverage the capabilities of autoencoders, graph neural networks, and other innovative network architectures, including generative adversarial networks, to capture complex nonlinear relationships within high-dimensional, noisy data. While model-based approaches offer greater interpretability through explicit statistical assumptions, they are often limited by their sensitivity to noise and data sparsity. Deep learning strategies, although computationally intensive and less interpretable, excel in recovering intricate data structures in large-scale datasets. By providing a comprehensive overview of these imputation strategies, this review aims to guide researchers in selecting the most appropriate methods for their specific datasets and downstream analyses, and to suggest future directions for improving imputation accuracy and integrating multi-omics data.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.816
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.032
GPT teacher head0.436
Teacher spread0.404 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it