Bayesian Differential Analysis of Cell Type Proportions

The analysis of cell type proportions in a biological sample should account for the compositional nature of the data but most analyses ignore this characteristic with the risk of producing misleading conclusions. The recent method scCODA appropriately incorporates these constraints by using a Bayesian Multinomial-Dirichlet model that requires a reference cell type to normalize the distribution of all cell types. However, a reference cell type that is stable across biological conditions may not always be available. Here, we present an approach that uses a Bayesian multinomial regression for the analysis of single cell distribution data without the need for a reference cell type. We show an implementation example using the rjags package within the R software.