DAF - Data in Axes in Formats

The DataAxesFormats package provides a uniform generic interface for accessing 1D and 2D data arranged along some set of axes. This is a much-needed generalization of the AnnData functionality. Unlike other generalizations (e.g., Muon), Daf attempts to provide a simple generic unified 1D and 2D data storage, which can be used for "any" purpose, not necessarily scRNA and/or ATAC data, though such use cases were the driving force for the development of Daf.

The key features of Daf are:

• Support both in-memory and persistent data storage of "any" format (given an adapter implementation).
• The implementation is thread-safe, using read/write locks, to allow safe and efficient parallel processing.
• Out of the box, allow importing and exporting AnnData objects (e.g., using h5ad files), storing the data in memory, directly inside H5FS files, or as a collection of simple memory-mapped files in a directory.
• Support views and adapters for applying generic algorithms to your specific data while using your own specific names for the data properties.
• Support chaining repositories for reusing a large base repository with one or more smaller computed results repositories, possibly computed in several ways for comparison of the results.
• The data model is based on (1) some axes with named entries, (2) vector data indexed by a single axis, (3) matrix data indexed by a pair of axes, and also (4) scalar data (anything not tied to some axis).
• The common case where one axis is a group of another is explicitly supported (e.g., storing a type for each cell, and having a type axis).
• A simple query language allows for common operations such as accessing subsets of the data ("age of all cells which aren't doublets") or group data ("color of type of cell") or aggregate data ("mean age of cells of batch").
• There is explicit control over 2D data layout (row or column major), and support for both dense and sparse matrices, both of which are crucial for performance.
• This is implemented in Julia, as a seed for efficient computation pipelines (which are hard to implement in Python without resorting to using C/C++ code). WIP: a DafPY Python package, which is a thin wrapper around DataAxesFormats allowing efficient (zero-copy) access to the data using numpy, scipy and pandas vector and matrix types. WIP: Implement a similar R package using JuliaCall to allow direct access to DataAxesFormats from R code.

See the v0.1.2 documentation for details.

Status

Version 0.1.2 is an alpha release. We hope it is feature complete and have started using it for internal projects. However, everything is subject to change based on user feedback (so don't be shy). Comments, bug reports and PRs are welcome!

Motivation

The Daf package was created to overcome the limitations of the AnnData package. Like AnnData, Daf was created to support code analyzing single-cell RNA sequencing data ("scRNA-seq"). Unlike AnnData, the Daf data model was designed from the start to naturally cover additional modalities (such as ATAC), as well as any other kind of 1D and 2D data arranged in common axes, without requiring further extensions.

The main issue we had with AnnData is that it restricts all the stored data to be described by two axes ("observations" and "variables"). E.g., in single-cell data, every cell would be an "observation" and every gene would be a "variable". As a secondary annoyance, AnnData gives one special "default" per-observation-per-variable data layer the uninformative name X, and only allows meaningful names for any additional data layers, which use a completely different access method.

This works pretty well until one starts to perform higher level operations:

• (Almost) everyone groups cells into "type" clusters. This requires storing per-cluster data (e.g., its name and its color).
• Since "type" clusters (hopefully) correspond to biological states, which map to gene expression levels, this requires also storing per-cluster-per-gene data.
• Often such clusters form at least a two-level hierarchy, so we need per-sub-cluster data and per-sub-cluster-per-gene data as well.
• Lately the use of multi-modal data (e.g. ATAC) also requires storing data per-cell-per-genome-location.

Sure, it is possible to use a set of AnnData objects, each with its own distinct set of "observations" (for cell, clusters, and sub-clusters), and/or "variables" (genes, genome locations). We can establish conventions about what X is in each data set, which will have to depend on the type of variables (UMIs for genes, accessibility for genome locations). We'll also need to replicate simple per-cell and per-gene data across the different AnnData objects, and keep it in sync, or just store each such data in one (or some) of the objects, and remember in which.

In short, we'd end up writing some problem-specific code to manage the multiple AnnData objects for us. An example of such an approach is Muon, which addresses part of the issue by introducing the concept of multiple "assays". This narrow approach doesn't address the issue of clustering, for example.

Instead, we have chosen to create Daf, which is a general-purpose solution that embraces the existence of arbitrary multiple axes in the same data set, and enforces no opaque default names, to make it easy for us store explicitly named data per-whatever-we-damn-please all in a single place.

When it comes to storage, Daf makes it as easy as possible to write adapters to allow storing the data in your favorite format. In particular, Daf allows storing a single (or multiple) data sets inside an HDF5 file in h5df/h5dfs files, similar to AnnData allowing storage in .h5ad files.

That said, we find that, for our use cases, the use of complex single-file formats such as HDF5 to be sub-optimal. In effect they function as a file system, but offer only some of its functionality. For example, you need special APIs to list the content of the data, copy or delete just parts of it, find out which parts have been changed when. Also, most implementations do not support memory-mapping the data, which causes a large performance hit for large data sets.

Therefore Daf also supports a simple files storage format where every property is stored in separate file(s) (in a trivial format) under some root directory. This allows for efficient memory-mapping of files, using standard file system tools to list, copy and/or delete data, and using tools like make to automate incremental computations. The main downside is that to send a data set across the network, one has to first collect it into a tar or zip or some other archive file format. This may actually end up being faster as this allows compressing the data for more efficient transmission or archiving. Besides, due to the limitations of AnnData, one often has to send multiple files for a complete data set anyway.

Daf also provides a simple in-memory storage format, which is a very efficient and lightweight container (similar to an in-memory AnnData object).

Since AnnData is used by many existing tools, Daf allows exporting (a subset of) a data set into AnnData, and present an AnnData data set as a (restricted) Daf data set.

It is possible to create zero-copy views of Daf data (slicing, renaming and hiding axes and/or specific properties), and to copy Daf data from one data set to another. Daf also allows chaining data sets, for example storing alternative clustering options in separates (small) data sets, next to the clustered data, without having to copy the (large) clustered data into each data set. The combination of views and chains avoids needlessly duplicating large amounts of data just to mold it to the form needed by some computational tool.

It is assumed that Daf data will be processed in a single machine, that is, Daf does not try to address the issues of a distributed cluster of servers working on a shared data set. Today's servers (as of 2023) can get very big (~100 cores and ~1TB of RAM is practical), which means that all/most data sets would fit comfortably in one machine (and memory mapped files are a great help here). In addition, if using the "files" storage, it is possible to have different servers access the same Daf directory, each computing a different independent additional annotation (e.g., one server searching for doublets while another is searching for gene modules), and as long as only one server writes each new data property, this should work fine (one can do even better by writing more complex code). This is another example of how simple files make it easy to provide functionality which is very difficult to achieve using a complex single-file format such as HDF5.

The bottom line is that Daf provides a "universal" (well, generic) useful abstraction layer for 1D and 2D data storage, which can be persisted in any "reasonable" storage format, allowing efficient computation and/or visualization code to naturally access and/or write only the data it needs, even for higher-level analysis pipeline, for small to "very large" (but not for "ludicrously large") data sets. Daf can import and export AnnData data sets for interoperability with legacy computation pipelines.

Installation

Just Pkg.add("DataAxesFormats"), like installing any other Julia package.

To install the Python Daf package, just pip install dafpy, like installing any other Python package.

TODO: To install the R wrappers...

License (MIT)

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