MuSiC utilizes cell-type specific gene expression from single-cell RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data to characterize cell type compositions from bulk RNA-seq data in complex tissues. By appropriate weighting of genes showing cross-subject and cross-cell consistency, MuSiC enables the transfer of cell type-specific gene expression information from one dataset to another.
Solid tissues often contain closely related cell types which leads to collinearity. To deal with collinearity, MuSiC employs a tree-guided procedure that recursively zooms in on closely related cell types. Briefly, we first group similar cell types into the same cluster and estimate cluster proportions, then recursively repeat this procedure within each cluster.