Scripts used for analysis of V1 and V2 Datasets.seurat_v1.R - initialize seurat object from 10X Genomics cellranger outputs. Includes filtering, normalization, regression, variable gene identification, PCA analysis, clustering, tSNE visualization. Used for v1 datasets. merge_seurat.R - merge two or more seurat objects into one seurat object. Perform linear regression to remove batch effects from separate objects. Used for v1 datasets. subcluster_seurat_v1.R - subcluster clusters of interest from Seurat object. Determine variable genes, perform regression and PCA. Used for v1 datasets.seurat_v2.R - initialize seurat object from 10X Genomics cellranger outputs. Includes filtering, normalization, regression, variable gene identification, and PCA analysis. Used for v2 datasets. clustering_markers_v2.R - clustering and tSNE visualization for v2 datasets. subcluster_seurat_v2.R - subcluster clusters of interest from Seurat object. Determine variable genes, perform regression and PCA analysis. Used for v2 datasets.seurat_object_analysis_v1_and_v2.R - downstream analysis and plotting functions for seurat object created by seurat_v1.R or seurat_v2.R. merge_clusters.R - merge clusters that do not meet gene threshold. Used for both v1 and v2 datasets. prepare_for_monocle_v1.R - subcluster cells of interest and perform linear regression, but not scaling in order to input normalized, regressed values into monocle with monocle_seurat_input_v1.R monocle_seurat_input_v1.R - monocle script using seurat batch corrected values as input for v1 merged timecourse datasets. monocle_lineage_trace.R - monocle script using nUMI as input for v2 lineage traced dataset. monocle_object_analysis.R - downstream analysis for monocle object - BEAM and plotting. CCA_merging_v2.R - script for merging v2 endocrine datasets with canonical correlation analysis and determining the number of CCs to include in downstream analysis. CCA_alignment_v2.R - script for downstream alignment, clustering, tSNE visualization, and differential gene expression analysis.

Sorting spikes from extracellular recording into clusters associated with distinct single units (putative neurons) is a fundamental step in analyzing neuronal populations. Such spike sorting is intrinsically unsupervised, as the number of neurons are not known a priori. Therefor, any spike sorting is an unsupervised learning problem that requires either of the two approaches: specification of a fixed value k for the number of clusters to seek, or generation of candidate partitions for several possible values of c, followed by selection of a best candidate based on various post-clustering validation criteria. In this paper, we investigate the first approach and evaluate the utility of several methods for providing lower dimensional visualization of the cluster structure and on subsequent spike clustering. We also introduce a visualization technique called improved visual assessment of cluster tendency (iVAT) to estimate possible cluster structures in data without the need for dimensionality reduction. Experimental results are conducted on two datasets with ground truth labels. In data with a relatively small number of clusters, iVAT is beneficial in estimating the number of clusters to inform the initialization of clustering algorithms. With larger numbers of clusters, iVAT gives a useful estimate of the coarse cluster structure but sometimes fails to indicate the presumptive number of clusters. We show that noise associated with recording extracellular neuronal potentials can disrupt computational clustering schemes, highlighting the benefit of probabilistic clustering models. Our results show that t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) provides representations of the data that yield more accurate visualization of potential cluster structure to inform the clustering stage. Moreover, The clusters obtained using t-SNE features were more reliable than the clusters obtained using the other methods, which indicates that t-SNE can potentially be used for both visualization and to extract features to be used by any clustering algorithm.