RESCUE: Imputing dropout events in single-cell RNA-sequencing data

Background: Single-cell RNA-sequencing technologies provide a powerful tool for systematic dissection of cellular heterogeneity. However, the prevalence of dropout events imposes complications during data analysis and, despite numerous efforts from the community, this challenge has yet to be solved. Results: Here we present a computational method, called RESCUE, to mitigate the dropout problem by imputing gene expression levels using information from other cells with similar patterns. Unlike existing methods, we use an ensemble-based approach to minimize the feature selection bias on imputation. By comparative analysis of simulated and real single-cell RNA-seq datasets, we show that RESCUE outperforms existing methods in terms of imputation accuracy which leads to more precise cell-type identification. Conclusions: Taken together, these results suggest that RESCUE is a useful tool for mitigating dropouts in single-cell RNA-seq data. RESCUE is implemented in R and available at https://github.com/seasamgo/rescue.