scMCG: Analyzing a Single-Cell Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin Using Sequencing Data Based on Contrastive Learning and Generative Adversarial Network

The development of single-cell assay for transposase-accessible chromatin using sequencing (scATAC-seq) has significantly advanced the study of cell heterogeneity in the epigenetic landscape. Numerous studies have leveraged scATAC-seq data to explore deeper gene regulatory relationships. However, scATAC-seq usually faces dropout events which may result in data sparsity and noise. In this work, we propose a method (scMCG) for analyzing scATAC-seq data that employs contrastive learning and a generative adversarial network (GAN). First, the scMCG method uses two distinct encoders for contrastive learning to solve the issues of feature redundancy and data sparsity in scATAC-seq data. Subsequently, a generator is used to reconstruct the latent embedding. Finally, a decoder is used to generate binary accessibility. We conduct experiments on multiple scATAC-seq datasets. The results demonstrate that the scMCG method achieves excellent performance in multiple tasks such as cell clustering and transcription factor activity influence.