Back

A supervised ontology-aware cell annotation method forsingle-cell transcriptomic data

Magre, N.; Alshehri, E.; Grab, F.; Ordabayev, Y.; McCarroll, S. A.; Babadi, M.; Fleming, S. J.

2026-01-14 bioinformatics
10.64898/2026.01.13.699356 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Many single-cell RNA-seq annotation methods ignore the hierarchical nature of cell type classification. We present a probability propagation strategy that enforces ontological consistency and improves performance when applied to existing models without retraining. Combined with a lightweight logistic regression model trained on 42 million human cells, this yields SOCAM, a fast and interpretable classifier. We also introduce a hop-based F1 score for ontology-aware evaluation. Code and models are available open source.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.