The development of large-scale single-cell atlases has allowed describing cell states in a more detailed manner. Meanwhile, current deep leanring methods enable rapid analysis of newly generated query datasets by mapping them into reference atlases. expiMap (‘explainable programmable mapper’) Lotfollahi, Mohammad, et al. is one of the methods proposed for single-cell reference mapping. Furthermore, it incorporates prior knowledge from gene sets databases or users to analyze query data in the context of known gene programs (GPs).

PopV uses popular vote of a variety of cell-type transfer tools to classify cell-types in a query dataset based on a test dataset. Using this variety of algorithms, they compute the agreement between those algorithms and use this agreement to predict which cell-types have a high likelihood of the same cell-types observed in the reference.

scVI-tools (single-cell variational inference tools) is a package for end-to-end analysis of single-cell omics data primarily developed and maintained by the Yosef Lab at UC Berkeley. scvi-tools has two components - Interface for easy use of a range of probabilistic models for single-cell omics (e.g., scVI, scANVI, totalVI). - Tools to build new probabilistic models, which are powered by PyTorch, PyTorch Lightning, and Pyro.