Limitations of cell embedding metrics assessed using drifting islands.

Wang, Hanchen; Leskovec, Jure; Regev, Aviv · Nat Biotechnol · 2025

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

Biological studies rely on embeddings of single-cell profiles but assessing the quality of these embeddings is challenging. Here we show that current evaluation metrics are incomplete by training a three-layer perceptron, Islander. Islander outperforms all leading embedding methods on a diverse set of cell atlases but it distorts biological structures, limiting its use for biological discovery. We then present a new metric, scGraph, to help flag such distortions.