ISLET: Individual-Specific ceLl typE referencing Tool

We developed a method called ISLET (Individual-Specific ceLl typE referencing Tool), to deconvolute mixture samples and obtain the individual-specific and cell-type-specific reference panels. ISLET can leverage on multiple observations or temporal measurements of the same subject. ISLET adopted a more reasonable assumption that repeated samples from the same subject would share the same reference panel. This unknown panel, treated as missing values, are estimated by an iterative Expectation–Maximization (EM) algorithm in mixed-effect regression framework, when combining all samples from all subjects together. This is the first statistical framework to estimate the subject-level cell-type-specific reference panel, for repeated measures. Our modeling can effectively borrow information across samples within the same subject.

ISLET is currently on Bioconductor at https://bioconductor.org/packages/ISLET/.