Joint inference of discrete and continuous factors captures variability across and within cell types

Abstract

We developed mixture model inference with discrete-coupled autoencoders (MMIDAS), an unsupervised variational framework that jointly learns discrete clusters and continuous cluster-specific variability. When applied to unimodal or multimodal single-cell omic data, MMIDAS learned single-cell representations with robust cell type definitions and interpretable, continuous within-cell type variability.