An unsupervised deep learning framework for gene regulatory network inference from single-cell expression data

Recent advances in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology provides unprecedented opportunities for reconstruction gene regulation networks (GRNs). At present, many different models have been proposed to infer GRN from a large number of RNA-seq data, but most deep learning models use a priori gene regulatory network to infer potential GRNs. It is a challenge to reconstruct GRNs from scRNA-seq data due to the noise and sparsity introduced by the dropout effect. Here, we propose GAALink, a novel unsupervised deep learning method. It first constructs the gene similarity matrix and then refines it by threshold value. It then learns feature representations of genes through a graphical attention autoencoder that propagates information across genes with different weights. Finally, we use gene feature expression for matrix completion such that the GRNs are reconstructed. Compared with seven existing GRNs reconstruction methods, GAALink achieves more accurate performance on seven scRNA-seq dataset with four ground truth networks. GAALink can provide a useful tool for inferring GRNs for scRNA-seq expression data.