pymagical 1.2.0

A Python port of the MAGICAL hierarchical Bayesian Gibbs sampler for regulatory circuit inference.

pymagical

pymagical is a high-performance Python port of the MAGICAL (Multiome Accessibility Gene Integration Calling and Looping) algorithm. It provides a method for inferring functional regulatory circuits—triads of Transcription Factors (TFs), cis-regulatory elements (Peaks), and target Genes—from single-cell RNA-seq and ATAC-seq data.

The methodology is based on the framework described in:

Chen et al., "Mapping disease regulatory circuits at cell-type resolution from single-cell multiomics data," Nature Computational Science, 2023. (Available here)

Key Features

• Numba-Accelerated Sampling: Optional JIT-compiled kernels provide a ~30x speedup in Gibbs sampling compared to the original MATLAB implementation (averaged across large-scale benchmarks).
• IO Caching: Automatically caches large sparse matrices and genomic metadata into PyArrow-backed Parquet and NumPy formats for near-instant subsequent loads (~15x faster than MATLAB).
• Biological Directionality: Unlike the original version, pymagical automatically classifies inferred circuits as activators (+) or repressors (-) by analyzing continuous regression weights.

Installation

The recommended way to install pymagical is via PyPI:

pip install pymagical

For interactive HTML reports and visualization features, install the viz extra:

pip install "pymagical[viz]"

Quick Start

1. Command Line Usage

Once installed, run the circuit inference directly from your terminal. Use --use-numba for maximum performance:

# Run with default data for 500 iterations using Numba
pymagical run --main-dir path/to/data --cell-dir astrocytes --iter 500 --use-numba --outdir results/

# Generate an interactive HTML visualization report (requires [viz] extra)
pymagical viz results/magical_py_500.txt

Run pymagical --help to see all available flags and subcommands.

2. Programmatic Usage

from pymagical import run_magical

run_magical(
    cand_gene_file="genes.txt",
    cand_peak_file="peaks.txt",
    # ... other file paths ...
    iteration_num=2000,
    use_numba=True,
    output_file="my_results.txt"
)

Citation

If you use MAGICAL in your research, please cite:

@article{chen_mapping_2023,
	title = {Mapping disease regulatory circuits at cell-type resolution from single-cell multiomics data},
	author = {Chen, Xi and Wang, Yuan and Cappuccio, Antonio and Cheng, Wan-Sze and Zamojski, Frederique Ruf and Nair, Venugopalan D. and Miller, Clare M. and Rubenstein, Aliza B. and Nudelman, German and Tadych, Alicja and Theesfeld, Chandra L. and Vornholt, Alexandria and George, Mary-Catherine and Ruffin, Felicia and Dagher, Michael and Chawla, Daniel G. and Soares-Schanoski, Alessandra and Spurbeck, Rachel R. and Ndhlovu, Lishomwa C. and Sebra, Robert and Kleinstein, Steven H. and Letizia, Andrew G. and Ramos, Irene and Fowler, Vance G. and Woods, Christopher W. and Zaslavsky, Elena and Troyanskaya, Olga G. and Sealfon, Stuart C.},
	journal = {Nature Computational Science},
	year = {2023},
	month = jul,
	doi = {10.1038/s43588-023-00476-5},
	url = {https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-023-00476-5},
}