scDCMAC:adaptive feedback clustering of scRNA-seq data with deep gene correlation mining

Cluster assignment is crucial for analyzing single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data, essential for studying cell diversity and biological functions at the single-cell level. Deep learning-based clustering methods have been extensively applied in scRNA-seq data analysis. However, current deep models frequently overlook the deep exploration of potential gene correlation, resulting in networks lacking guidance from gene correlation information when learning hidden layer features. This paper proposes an adaptive feedback fuzzy clustering method based on deep gene correlation mining(scDCMAC). The deep gene correlation mining network employs contrast learning to compute the contrast loss on two cell similarity matrices, constructed from denoised autoencoder hidden layer features and original input features, to uncover potential gene correlation. The adaptive feedback clustering network further denoises the hidden layer features using a self-attention mechanism, computes the affiliation matrix, and supervises the denoising autoencoder’s dimensionality reduction using the affiliation matrix. Experiments on 13 real scRNA-seq datasets demonstrate that scDCMAC excels in clustering accuracy and stability, showing great potential in scRNA-seq sample analysis.