Scedar: A scalable Python package for single-cell RNA-seq exploratory data analysis

PLoS Comput Biol. 2020 Apr 27;16(4):e1007794. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007794. eCollection 2020 Apr.

Abstract

In single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) experiments, the number of individual cells has increased exponentially, and the sequencing depth of each cell has decreased significantly. As a result, analyzing scRNA-seq data requires extensive considerations of program efficiency and method selection. In order to reduce the complexity of scRNA-seq data analysis, we present scedar, a scalable Python package for scRNA-seq exploratory data analysis. The package provides a convenient and reliable interface for performing visualization, imputation of gene dropouts, detection of rare transcriptomic profiles, and clustering on large-scale scRNA-seq datasets. The analytical methods are efficient, and they also do not assume that the data follow certain statistical distributions. The package is extensible and modular, which would facilitate the further development of functionalities for future requirements with the open-source development community. The scedar package is distributed under the terms of the MIT license at https://pypi.org/project/scedar.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Animals
  • Brain Chemistry
  • Cells, Cultured
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Humans
  • Mice
  • RNA, Small Cytoplasmic / genetics
  • RNA-Seq / methods*
  • Single-Cell Analysis / methods*
  • Software*
  • Transcriptome / genetics

Substances

  • RNA, Small Cytoplasmic

Grants and funding

All authors received support for this work from the Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics and the CHOP Research Institute at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.