demuxSNP: supervised demultiplexing single-cell RNA sequencing using cell hashing and SNPs

Background: Multiplexing single-cell RNA sequencing experiments reduces sequencing cost and facilitates larger-scale studies. However, factors such as cell hashing quality and class size imbalance impact demultiplexing algorithm performance, reducing cost effectiveness. Findings: We propose a supervised algorithm, demuxSNP, which leverages both cell hashing and genetic variation between individuals (single-nucletotide polymorphisms [SNPs]). demuxSNP addresses fundamental limitations in demultiplexing methods that use only one data modality. Some cells may be confidently demultiplexed using probabilistic hashing methods. demuxSNP uses these data to infer the genotype of singlet and doublet clusters and predict on cells assigned as negative, uncertain, or doublet using a nearest-neighbor approach adapted for missing data. We benchmarked demuxSNP against hashing, genotype-free SNP and hybrid methods on simulated and real data from renal cell cancer. demuxSNP outperformed standalone hashing methods on low-quality hashing data benchmark, improved overall classifica?tion accuracy, and allowed more high RNA quality cells to be recovered. Through varying simulated doublet rates, we showed that genotype-free SNP and hybrid methods that leverage them were impacted by class size imbalance and doublet rate. demuxSNP’s supervised approach was more robust to doublet rate in experiments with class size imbalance. Conclusions: demuxSNP uses hashing and SNP data to demultiplex datasets with low hashing quality where biological samples are genetically distinct. Unassigned or negative cells with high RNA quality are recovered, making more cells available for analysis. Data simulation and benchmarking pipelines as well as processed benchmarking data for 5–50% doublets are publicly available. demuxSNP is available as an R/Bioconductor package (https://doi.org/doi:10.18129/B9.bioc.demuxSNP)