A tensor decomposition-based integrated analysis applicable to multiple gene expression profiles without sample matching

Abstract

The integrated analysis of multiple gene expression profiles measured in distinct studies is always problematic. Especially, missing sample matching and missing common labeling between distinct studies prevent the integration of multiple studies in fully data-driven and unsupervised manner. In this study, we propose a strategy enabling the integration of multiple gene expression profiles among multiple independent studies without either labeling or sample matching, using tensor decomposition-based unsupervised feature extraction. As an example, we applied this strategy to Alzheimer’s disease (AD)-related gene expression profiles that lack exact correspondence among samples as well as AD single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data. We found that we could select biologically reasonable genes with integrated analysis. Overall, integrated gene expression profiles can function analogously to prior learning and/or transfer learning strategies in other machine learning applications. For scRNA-seq, the proposed approach was able to drastically reduce the required computational memory.