SpatialCVGAE: Consensus Clustering Improves Spatial Domain Identification of Spatial Transcriptomics Using VGAE

The advent of spatially resolved transcriptomics (SRT) has provided critical insights into the spatial context of tissue microenvironments. Spatial clustering is a fundamental aspect of analyzing spatial transcriptomics data. However, spatial clustering methods often suffer from instability caused by the sparsity and high noise in the SRT data. To address this challenge, we propose SpatialCVGAE, a consensus clustering framework designed for SRT data analysis. SpatialCVGAE adopts the expression of high-variable genes from different dimensions along with multiple spatial graphs as inputs to variational graph autoencoders (VGAEs), learning multiple latent representations for clustering. These clustering results are then integrated using a consensus clustering approach, which enhances the model's stability and robustness by combining multiple clustering outcomes. Experiments demonstrate that SpatialCVGAE effectively mitigates the instability typically associated with non-ensemble deep learning methods, significantly improving both the stability and accuracy of the results. Compared to previous non-ensemble methods in representation learning and post-processing, our method fully leverages the diversity of multiple representations to accurately identify spatial domains, showing superior robustness and adaptability. All code and public datasets used in this paper are available at https://github.com/wenwenmin/SpatialCVGAE.