TY - JOUR T1 - Normalization and variance stabilization of single-cell RNA-seq data using regularized negative binomial regression JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/576827 SP - 576827 AU - Christoph Hafemeister AU - Rahul Satija Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/14/576827.abstract N2 - Single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data exhibits significant cell-to-cell variation due to technical factors, including the number of detected molecules in each cell, which can confound biological heterogeneity with technical effects. To address this, we present a modeling framework for the normalization and variance stabilization of molecular count data from scRNA-seq experiments. We propose that the Pearson residuals from ’regularized negative binomial regression’, where cellular sequencing depth is utilized as a covariate in a generalized linear model, successfully remove the influence of technical characteristics from downstream analyses while preserving biological heterogeneity. Importantly, we show that an unconstrained negative binomial model may overfit scRNA-seq data, and overcome this by pooling information across genes with similar abundances to obtain stable parameter estimates. Our procedure omits the need for heuristic steps including pseudocount addition or log-transformation, and improves common downstream analytical tasks including variable gene selection, dimensional reduction, and differential expression. Our procedure can be applied to any UMI-based scRNA-seq dataset and is freely available as part of the R package sctransform, with a direct interface to our single-cell toolkit Seurat. ER -