# Analysis Pipeline¶

The following tutorial gives an introduction to the basic analysis functions of the velocyto library.

## Velocyto Loom¶

import velocyto as vcy
vlm = vcy.VelocytoLoom("YourData.loom")


Different steps of analysis can be carried on by simply calling the methods of this VelocytoLoom object. New variables, normalized version of the data matrixes and other parameters will be stored as attributes of the “VelocytoLoom” object (method calls will not return any value). For example normalization and log transformation can be performed by calling the normalize method:

vlm.normalize("S", size=True, log=True)
vlm.S_norm  # contains log normalized


The docstring of every function specifies which attributes will be generated or modified at each method call.

“VelocytoLoom” object supports some ready-made plotting functions. For example, one of the first checks is spliced/unspliced fractions of the dataset can be done by calling:

vlm.plot_fractions()


You can save the results of your analysis in a serialized object at any time by running:

vlm.dump_hdf5("my_velocyto_analysis")


In another session you can reload the vlm object by running:

load_velocyto_hdf5("my_velocyto_analysis.hdf5")


This is similar to what the pickle module in python standard library is doing but here only the attributes of the VelocytoLoom object are saved and stored as a hdf5 file. Notice that the size on disk of the serialized file can change depending on the step of the analysis the object is saved (e.g. pre/post filtering or before/after calculating distance matrixes).

Note

VelocytoLoom object methods operate on the object attributes performing filtering, normalization adn other calcualtion. Therefore the order in which they are run is important to get a meaningful output from velocyto. We suggest calling these functions in the order shown in this tutorial or in the example notebooks.

### Note on Default Shortcuts¶

In velocyto, the methods starting with the prefix default_* are implemented as a quick-and-dirty shortcut to get the new user started.

These methods are aggregators that call several velocyto functions using some simple heuristics to set the thresholds and parameters to reasonable values. However, those methods are far from perfect and in some datasets they could even lead to runtime errors.

We meant those as reference to the new user and we recommend to inspect the source of these functions and adapt the parameters to the specific dataset.

## Preliminary Filtering¶

At this point we can perform feature selection and normalization of the data.

In order to obtain better results the preliminary filtering is usually adapted for each dataset.

For the purpose of this tutorial we will be using the shortcut default_filter_and_norm .

vlm.default_filter_and_norm()


Notice that the method supports limited options in comparison to the full API. For a finer tuning of filtering parameters inspect the source code of the method in the API page normalization and filtering function can be called at any step of the analysis Furthermore, it is important to notice that the function starting

## Preparation for gamma fit¶

For the preparation of the gamma fit we smooth the data using a kNN neighbors pooling approach. kNN neighbors can be calculated directly in gene expression space or reduced PCA space, using either correlation distance or euclidean distance. The default procedure kNN graph pooling/smoothing is implemented default_fit_preparation, finer control can be achieved explicitly calling the knn_imputation method.

vlm.default_fit_preparation()


## Gamma fit and extrapolation¶

To fit gamma to every gene that survived the filtering step we can just call

vlm.fit_gammas()


The fit can be visualized by calling plot_phase_portraits and listing the gene names:

vlm.plot_phase_portraits(["Igfbpl1", "Pdgfra"])


The extrapolation can be obtained as follows:

vlm.predict_U()
vlm.calculate_velocity()
vlm.calculate_shift(assumption="constant_velocity")
vlm.extrapolate_cell_at_t(delta_t=1)


## Projection of velocity onto embeddings¶

The extrapolated cell state is a vector in expression space (available as the attribute vlm.Sx_sz_t). One of the most convenient way to visualize the extrapolated state is to project it on a low dimensional embedding that appropriately summarizes the variability of the data that is of interest. The embedding can be calculated with your favorite method or external package as soon as it is saved as an attribute of the VelocytoLoom object. For example, let’s use scikit-learn TSNE implementation and make it available as ts attribute as following:

from sklearn.manifold import TSNE
bh_tsne = TSNE()
vlm.ts = bh_tsne.fit_transform(vlm.pcs[:, :25])


Now we can project on vlm.ts by calling estimate_transition_prob.

Warning

For big datasets this code can take long time to run! We suggest to run it on multicore machines (since the implementation is fully multithreaded)

vlm.estimate_transition_prob(hidim="Sx_sz", embed="ts")
vlm.calculate_embedding_shift(sigma_corr = 0.05)


In case of very big dataset visualizations a good way to summarize the velocity is to visualize it as velocity field calculated on a grid.

vlm.calculate_grid_arrows(smooth=0.8, steps=(40, 40), n_neighbors=300)
vlm.plot_grid_arrows(scatter_kwargs_dict={"alpha":0.35, "lw":0.35, "edgecolor":"0.4", "s":38, "rasterized":True}, min_mass=24, angles='xy', scale_units='xy',