D-EE: Distributed software for visualizing intrinsic structure of large-scale single-cell data

BACKGROUND: Dimensionality reduction and visualization play vital roles in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data analysis. While they have been extensively studied, state-of-the-art dimensionality reduction algorithms are often unable to preserve the global structures underlying data. Elastic embedding (EE), a nonlinear dimensionality reduction method, has shown promise in revealing low-dimensional intrinsic local and global data structure. However, the current implementation of the EE algorithm lacks scalability to large-scale scRNA-seq data. RESULTS: We present a distributed optimization implementation of the EE algorithm, termed distributed elastic embedding (D-EE). D-EE reveals the low-dimensional intrinsic structures of data with accuracy equal to that of elastic embedding, and it is scalable to large-scale scRNA-seq data. It leverages distributed storage and distributed computation, achieving memory efficiency and high-performance computing simultaneously. In addition, an extended version of D-EE, termed distributed optimization implementation of time-series elastic embedding (D-TSEE), enables the user to visualize large-scale time-series scRNA-seq data by incorporating experimentally temporal information. Results with large-scale scRNA-seq data indicate that D-TSEE can uncover oscillatory gene expression patterns by using experimentally temporal information. CONCLUSIONS: D-EE is a distributed dimensionality reduction and visualization tool. Its distributed storage and distributed computation technique allow us to efficiently analyze large-scale single-cell data at the cost of constant time speedup. The source code for D-EE algorithm based on C and MPI tailored to a high-performance computing cluster is available at https://github.com/ShaokunAn/D-EE.