PARC: ultrafast and accurate clustering of phenotypic data of millions of single cells

Bioinformatics. 2020 May 1;36(9):2778-2786. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa042.

Abstract

Motivation: New single-cell technologies continue to fuel the explosive growth in the scale of heterogeneous single-cell data. However, existing computational methods are inadequately scalable to large datasets and therefore cannot uncover the complex cellular heterogeneity.

Results: We introduce a highly scalable graph-based clustering algorithm PARC-Phenotyping by Accelerated Refined Community-partitioning-for large-scale, high-dimensional single-cell data (>1 million cells). Using large single-cell flow and mass cytometry, RNA-seq and imaging-based biophysical data, we demonstrate that PARC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art clustering algorithms without subsampling of cells, including Phenograph, FlowSOM and Flock, in terms of both speed and ability to robustly detect rare cell populations. For example, PARC can cluster a single-cell dataset of 1.1 million cells within 13 min, compared with >2 h for the next fastest graph-clustering algorithm. Our work presents a scalable algorithm to cope with increasingly large-scale single-cell analysis.

Availability and implementation: https://github.com/ShobiStassen/PARC.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Exome Sequencing
  • RNA-Seq
  • Single-Cell Analysis*
  • Software