Fuzzy-Based Identification of Transition Cells to Infer Cell Trajectory for Single-Cell Transcriptomics

With the continuous evolution of single-cell RNA sequencing technology, it has become feasible to reconstruct cell development processes using computational methods. Trajectory inference is a crucial downstream analytical task that provides valuable insights into understanding cell cycle and differentiation. During cell development, cells exhibit both stable and transition states, which makes it challenging to accurately identify these cells. To address this challenge, we propose a novel single-cell trajectory inference method using fuzzy clustering, named scFCTI. By introducing fuzzy clustering and quantifying cell uncertainty, scFCTI can identify transition cells within unstable cell states. Moreover, scFCTI can obtain refined cell classification by characterizing different cell stages, which gain more accurate single-cell trajectory reconstruction containing transition paths. To validate the effectiveness of scFCTI, we conduct experiments on five real datasets and four different structure simulation datasets, comparing them with several state-of-the-art trajectory inference methods. The results demonstrate that scFCTI outperforms these methods by successfully identifying unstable cell clusters and obtaining more accurate cell paths with transition states. Especially the experimental results demonstrate that scFCTI can reconstruct the cell trajectory more precisely.