Daily Digest September 16, 2019 – BioDecoded

Reseachers benchmarked 22 classification methods that automatically assign cell identities including single-cell-specific and general-purpose classifiers. The performance of the methods is evaluated using 27 publicly available single-cell RNA sequencing datasets of different sizes, technologies, species, and levels of complexity. The general-purpose support vector machine classifier has overall the best performance across the different experiments. Researchers present a novel algorithm for predicting genetic ancestry using only variables that are routinely captured in electronic health records (EHRs), such as self-reported race and ethnicity, and condition billing codes. Using patients that have both genetic and clinical information at Columbia University / New York-Presbyterian Irving Medical Center, they developed a pipeline that uses only clinical data to predict the genetic ancestry of all patients of which more than 80% identify as other or unknown.