Clustering Deviation Index (CDI): A robust and accurate internal measure for evaluating scRNA-seq data clustering

The clustering of cells has been widely used to explore the heterogeneity of cell populations in single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq). We proposed a parametric model for monoclonal and polyclonal scRNA-seq data to evaluate clustering results. Based on the parametric model, we proposed a metric (CDI) to quantify the goodness-of-fit of cell clustering to the data. Here we presented CT26.WT and T-CELL as two datasets to examine the performance of our model and metric. CT26.WT contains wild-type CT26 cells from the murine colorectal carcinoma cell line, and cells in CT26.WT are highly homogeneous. T-CELL contains T-cells from tumor tissue of mice three weeks after 4T1 tumor injection. From these datasets and public datasets, we validated our model and benchmarked our metric.