Joint probabilistic modeling of single-cell multi-omic data with totalVI

The paired measurement of RNA and surface proteins in single cells with cellular indexing of transcriptomes and epitopes by sequencing (CITE-seq) is a promising approach to connect transcriptional variation with cell phenotypes and functions. However, combining these paired views into a unified representation of cell state is made challenging by the unique technical characteristics of each measurement. Here we present Total Variational Inference (totalVI; https://scvi-tools.org), a framework for end-to-end joint analysis of CITE-seq data that probabilistically represents the data as a composite of biological and technical factors, including protein background and batch effects. To evaluate totalVI’s performance, we profiled immune cells from murine spleen and lymph nodes with CITE-seq, measuring over 100 surface proteins. We demonstrate that totalVI provides a cohesive solution for common analysis tasks such as dimensionality reduction, the integration of datasets with different measured proteins, estimation of correlations between molecules and differential expression testing.