Unsupervised topological alignment for single-cell multi-omics integration

Motivation: Single-cell multi-omics data provide a comprehensive molecular view of cells. However, single-cell multi-omics datasets consist of unpaired cells measured with distinct unmatched features across modalities, making data integration challenging. Results: In this study, we present a novel algorithm, termed UnionCom, for the unsupervised topological alignment of single-cell multi-omics integration. UnionCom does not require any correspondence information, either among cells or among features. It first embeds the intrinsic low-dimensional structure of each single-cell dataset into a distance matrix of cells within the same dataset and then aligns the cells across single-cell multi-omics datasets by matching the distance matrices via a matrix optimization method. Finally, it projects the distinct unmatched features across single-cell datasets into a common embedding space for feature comparability of the aligned cells. To match the complex non-linear geometrical distorted low-dimensional structures across datasets, UnionCom proposes and adjusts a global scaling parameter on distance matrices for aligning similar topological structures. It does not require one-to-one correspondence among cells across datasets, and it can accommodate samples with dataset-specific cell types. UnionCom outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both simulated and real single-cell multi-omics datasets. UnionCom is robust to parameter choices, as well as subsampling of features.