SCITUNA: single-cell data integration tool using network alignment.

Abstract

Background: As single-cell genomics experiments increase in complexity and scale, the need to integrate multiple datasets has grown. Such integration enhances cellular feature identification by leveraging larger data volumes. However, batch effects-technical variations arising from differences in labs, times, or protocols-pose a significant challenge. Despite numerous proposed batch correction methods, many still have limitations, such as outputting only dimension-reduced data, relying on computationally intensive models, or resulting in overcorrection for batches with diverse cell type composition.

Results: We introduce a novel method for batch effect correction named SCITUNA, a Single-Cell data Integration Tool Using Network Alignment. We perform evaluations on 39 individual batches from four real datasets and a simulated dataset, which include both scRNA-seq and scATAC-seq datasets, spanning multiple organisms and tissues. A thorough comparison of existing batch correction methods using 13 metrics reveals that SCITUNA outperforms current approaches and is successful at preserving biological signals present in the original data. In particular, SCITUNA shows a better performance than the current methods in all the comparisons except for the multiple batch integration of the lung dataset where the difference is 0.004.

Conclusion: SCITUNA effectively removes batch effects while retaining the biological signals present in the data. Our extensive experiments reveal that SCITUNA will be a valuable tool for diverse integration tasks.