Biological network inference from single-cell multi-omics data using heterogeneous graph transformer

We present DeepMAPS, a deep learning platform for cell-type-specific biological gene network inference from single-cell multi-omics (scMulti-omics). DeepMAPS includes both cells and genes in a heterogeneous graph to infer cell-cell, cell-gene, and gene-gene relations simultaneously. The graph attention neural network considers a cell and a gene with both local and global information, making DeepMAPS more robust to data noises. We benchmarked DeepMAPS on 18 datasets for cell clustering and network inference, and the results showed that our method outperforms various existing tools. We further applied DeepMAPS on a case study of lung tumor leukocyte CITE-seq data and observed superior performance in cell clustering, and predicted biologically meaningful cell-cell communication pathways based on the inferred gene networks. To improve the feasibility and ensure the reproducibility of analyzing scMulti-omics data, we deployed a webserver with multi-functions and various visualizations. Overall, we valued DeepMAPS as a novel platform of the state-of-the-art deep learning model in the single-cell study and can promote the use of scMulti-omics data in the community.