SSBER: removing batch effect for single-cell RNA sequencing data

BACKGROUND: With the continuous maturity of sequencing technology, different laboratories or different sequencing platforms have generated a large amount of single-cell transcriptome sequencing data for the same or different tissues. Due to batch effects and high dimensions of scRNA data, downstream analysis often faces challenges. Although a number of algorithms and tools have been proposed for removing batch effects, the current mainstream algorithms have faced the problem of data overcorrection when the cell type composition varies greatly between batches. RESULTS: In this paper, we propose a novel method named SSBER by utilizing biological prior knowledge to guide the correction, aiming to solve the problem of poor batch-effect correction when the cell type composition differs greatly between batches. CONCLUSIONS: SSBER effectively solves the above problems and outperforms other algorithms when the cell type structure among batches or distribution of cell population varies considerably, or some similar cell types exist across batches.