# Analysis Pipeline¶

Tutorial of the basic analysis functions.

## 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 the VelocytoLoom. New variables, normalization and parameter will be saved and available as attributes of “VelocytoLoom” the object, while the call does not return anything. 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


Furthermore “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()


The unspliced fraction should be ~10% of all the molecules.

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 attribute of the VelocytoLoom object are seved 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).

## 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. However, we implemented the method default_filter_and_norm as a quick shortcut to get started. The method uses some heuristics to set the thresholds to reasonable values considering the size of the dataset.

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

## 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',