%0 Journal Article
%T scGAAC: A graph attention autoencoder for clustering single-cell RNA-sequencing data.
%A Zhang L
%A Xiang H
%A Wang F
%A Chen Z
%A Shen M
%A Ma J
%A Liu H
%A Zheng H
%J Methods
%V 229
%N 0
%D 2024 Sep 29
%M 38950719
%F 4.647
%R 10.1016/j.ymeth.2024.06.010
%X Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) enables the investigation of intricate mechanisms governing cell heterogeneity and diversity. Clustering analysis remains a pivotal tool in scRNA-seq for discerning cell types. However, persistent challenges arise from noise, high dimensionality, and dropout in single-cell data. Despite the proliferation of scRNA-seq clustering methods, these often focus on extracting representations from individual cell expression data, neglecting potential intercellular relationships. To overcome this limitation, we introduce scGAAC, a novel clustering method based on an attention-based graph convolutional autoencoder. By leveraging structural information between cells through a graph attention autoencoder, scGAAC uncovers latent relationships while extracting representation information from single-cell gene expression patterns. An attention fusion module amalgamates the learned features of the graph attention autoencoder and the autoencoder through attention weights. Ultimately, a self-supervised learning policy guides model optimization. scGAAC, a hypothesis-free framework, performs better on four real scRNA-seq datasets than most state-of-the-art methods. The scGAAC implementation is publicly available on Github at: https://github.com/labiip/scGAAC.