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Disease State Prediction From Single-Cell Data Using Graph Attention Networks

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has revolutionized biological discovery, providing an unbiased picture of cellular heterogeneity in tissues. While scRNA-seq has been used extensively to provide insight into both healthy systems and diseases, it has not been used for disease prediction or diagnostics. Graph Attention Networks (GAT) have proven to be versatile for a wide range of tasks by learning from both original features and graph structures. Here we present a graph attention model for predicting disease state from single-cell data on a large dataset of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patients. MS is a disease of the central nervous system that can be difficult to diagnose. We train our model on single-cell data obtained from blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) for a cohort of seven MS patients and six healthy adults (HA), resulting in 66,667 individual cells. We achieve 92 % accuracy in predicting MS, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods such as a graph convolutional network and a random forest classifier. Further, we use the learned graph attention model to get insight into the features (cell types and genes) that are important for this prediction. The graph attention model also allow us to infer a new feature space for the cells that emphasizes the differences between the two conditions. Finally we use the attention weights to learn a new low-dimensional embedding that can be visualized. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort to use graph attention, and deep learning in general, to predict disease state from single-cell data. We envision applying this method to single-cell data for other diseases.

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