CAMML with the Integration of Marker Proteins (ChIMP)

Motivation: Cell typing is a critical task in the analysis of single-cell data, particularly when studying complex diseased tissues. Unfortunately, the sparsity and noise of single-cell data make accurate cell typing of individual cells difficult. To address these challenges, we previously developed the CAMML method for multi-label cell typing of single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. CAMML uses weighted gene sets to score each profiled cell for multiple potential cell types. While CAMML outperforms other scRNA-seq cell typing techniques, it only leverages transcriptomic data so cannot take advantage of newer multi-omic single-cell assays that jointly profile gene expression and protein abundance (e.g. joint scRNA-seq/CITE-seq). Results: We developed the CAMML with the Integration of Marker Proteins (ChIMP) method to support multi-label cell typing of individual cells jointly profiled via scRNA-seq and CITE-seq. ChIMP combines cell type scores computed on scRNA-seq data via the CAMML approach with discretized CITE-seq measurements for cell type marker proteins. The multi-omic cell type scores generated by ChIMP allow researchers to more precisely and conservatively cell type joint scRNA-seq/CITE-seq data.