Downsampling

library(tidytof)
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)

count <- dplyr::count

Often, high-dimensional cytometry experiments collect tens or hundreds or millions of cells in total, and it can be useful to downsample to a smaller, more computationally tractable number of cells - either for a final analysis or while developing code.

To do this, {tidytof} implements the tof_downsample() verb, which allows downsampling using 3 methods: downsampling to an integer number of cells, downsampling to a fixed proportion of the total number of input cells, or downsampling to a fixed cellular density in phenotypic space.

Downsampling with tof_downsample()

Using {tidytof}’s built-in dataset phenograph_data, we can see that the original size of the dataset is 1000 cells per cluster, or 3000 cells in total:

data(phenograph_data)

phenograph_data |>
    dplyr::count(phenograph_cluster)
#> # A tibble: 3 × 2
#>   phenograph_cluster     n
#>   <chr>              <int>
#> 1 cluster1            1000
#> 2 cluster2            1000
#> 3 cluster3            1000

To randomly sample 200 cells per cluster, we can use tof_downsample() using the “constant” method:

phenograph_data |>
    # downsample
    tof_downsample(
        group_cols = phenograph_cluster,
        method = "constant",
        num_cells = 200
    ) |>
    # count the number of downsampled cells in each cluster
    count(phenograph_cluster)
#> # A tibble: 3 × 2
#>   phenograph_cluster     n
#>   <chr>              <int>
#> 1 cluster1             200
#> 2 cluster2             200
#> 3 cluster3             200

Alternatively, if we wanted to sample 50% of the cells in each cluster, we could use the “prop” method:

phenograph_data |>
    # downsample
    tof_downsample(
        group_cols = phenograph_cluster,
        method = "prop",
        prop_cells = 0.5
    ) |>
    # count the number of downsampled cells in each cluster
    count(phenograph_cluster)
#> # A tibble: 3 × 2
#>   phenograph_cluster     n
#>   <chr>              <int>
#> 1 cluster1             500
#> 2 cluster2             500
#> 3 cluster3             500

And finally, we might also be interested in taking a slightly different approach to downsampling that reduces the number of cells not to a fixed constant or proportion, but to a fixed density in phenotypic space. For example, the following scatterplot demonstrates that there are certain areas of phenotypic density in phenograph_data that contain more cells than others along the cd34/cd38 axes:

rescale_max <-
    function(x, to = c(0, 1), from = range(x, na.rm = TRUE)) {
        x / from[2] * to[2]
    }

phenograph_data |>
    # preprocess all numeric columns in the dataset
    tof_preprocess(undo_noise = FALSE) |>
    # plot
    ggplot(aes(x = cd34, y = cd38)) +
    geom_hex() +
    coord_fixed(ratio = 0.4) +
    scale_x_continuous(limits = c(NA, 1.5)) +
    scale_y_continuous(limits = c(NA, 4)) +
    scale_fill_viridis_c(
        labels = function(x) round(rescale_max(x), 2)
    ) +
    labs(
        fill = "relative density"
    )

To reduce the number of cells in our dataset until the local density around each cell in our dataset is relatively constant, we can use the “density” method of tof_downsample:

phenograph_data |>
    tof_preprocess(undo_noise = FALSE) |>
    tof_downsample(method = "density", density_cols = c(cd34, cd38)) |>
    # plot
    ggplot(aes(x = cd34, y = cd38)) +
    geom_hex() +
    coord_fixed(ratio = 0.4) +
    scale_x_continuous(limits = c(NA, 1.5)) +
    scale_y_continuous(limits = c(NA, 4)) +
    scale_fill_viridis_c(
        labels = function(x) round(rescale_max(x), 2)
    ) +
    labs(
        fill = "relative density"
    )

Thus, we can see that the density after downsampling is more uniform (though not exactly uniform) across the range of cd34/cd38 values in phenograph_data.

Additional documentation

For more details, check out the documentation for the 3 underlying members of the tof_downsample_* function family (which are wrapped by tof_downsample):

  • tof_downsample_constant
  • tof_downsample_prop
  • tof_downsample_density

Session info

sessionInfo()
#> R version 4.6.1 (2026-06-24)
#> Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
#> Running under: Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS
#> 
#> Matrix products: default
#> BLAS:   /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libblas.so.3 
#> LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libopenblasp-r0.3.32.so;  LAPACK version 3.12.0
#> 
#> locale:
#>  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
#>  [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
#>  [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
#>  [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
#>  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
#> [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       
#> 
#> time zone: Etc/UTC
#> tzcode source: system (glibc)
#> 
#> attached base packages:
#> [1] stats4    stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods  
#> [8] base     
#> 
#> other attached packages:
#>  [1] tidyr_1.3.2                 stringr_1.6.0              
#>  [3] HDCytoData_1.33.1           flowCore_2.25.1            
#>  [5] SummarizedExperiment_1.43.0 Biobase_2.73.2             
#>  [7] GenomicRanges_1.65.4        Seqinfo_1.3.2              
#>  [9] IRanges_2.47.5              S4Vectors_0.51.10          
#> [11] MatrixGenerics_1.25.0       matrixStats_1.5.0          
#> [13] ExperimentHub_3.3.2         AnnotationHub_4.3.2        
#> [15] BiocFileCache_3.3.0         dbplyr_2.6.0               
#> [17] BiocGenerics_0.59.12        generics_0.1.4             
#> [19] forcats_1.0.1               ggplot2_4.0.3              
#> [21] dplyr_1.2.1                 tidytof_1.7.0              
#> [23] rmarkdown_2.32             
#> 
#> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
#>   [1] RColorBrewer_1.1-3   sys_3.4.3            jsonlite_2.0.0      
#>   [4] shape_1.4.6.1        magrittr_2.0.5       farver_2.1.2        
#>   [7] vctrs_0.7.3          memoise_2.0.1        sparsevctrs_0.3.6   
#>  [10] BiocBaseUtils_1.15.1 htmltools_0.5.9      S4Arrays_1.13.2     
#>  [13] curl_8.0.0           SparseArray_1.13.4   sass_0.4.10         
#>  [16] parallelly_1.48.0    bslib_0.12.0         httr2_1.3.0         
#>  [19] lubridate_1.9.5      cachem_1.1.0         buildtools_1.0.0    
#>  [22] igraph_2.3.4         lifecycle_1.0.5      iterators_1.0.14    
#>  [25] pkgconfig_2.0.3      Matrix_1.7-6         R6_2.6.1            
#>  [28] fastmap_1.2.0        future_1.76.0        digest_0.6.39       
#>  [31] AnnotationDbi_1.75.2 RSpectra_0.16-2      RSQLite_3.53.3      
#>  [34] labeling_0.4.3       filelock_1.0.3       cytolib_2.25.0      
#>  [37] yardstick_1.4.0      timechange_0.4.0     httr_1.4.9          
#>  [40] polyclip_1.10-7      abind_1.4-8          compiler_4.6.1      
#>  [43] bit64_4.8.6          withr_3.0.3          doParallel_1.0.17   
#>  [46] S7_0.2.2             viridis_0.6.5        DBI_1.3.0           
#>  [49] ggforce_0.5.0        MASS_7.3-66          lava_1.9.3          
#>  [52] embed_1.2.2          rappdirs_0.3.4       DelayedArray_0.39.8 
#>  [55] tools_4.6.1          otel_0.2.0           future.apply_1.20.2 
#>  [58] nnet_7.3-21          glue_1.8.1           grid_4.6.1          
#>  [61] Rtsne_0.17           recipes_1.4.0        gtable_0.3.6        
#>  [64] tzdb_0.5.0           class_7.3-24         data.table_1.18.6.1 
#>  [67] hms_1.1.4            utf8_1.2.6           tidygraph_1.3.1     
#>  [70] XVector_0.53.0       RcppAnnoy_0.0.23     ggrepel_0.9.8       
#>  [73] BiocVersion_3.24.0   foreach_1.5.2        pillar_1.11.1       
#>  [76] RcppHNSW_0.7.0       splines_4.6.1        tweenr_2.0.3        
#>  [79] lattice_0.23-1       survival_3.8-12      bit_4.6.0           
#>  [82] RProtoBufLib_2.25.0  tidyselect_1.2.1     maketools_1.3.2     
#>  [85] Biostrings_2.81.9    knitr_1.52           gridExtra_2.3.1     
#>  [88] xfun_0.61            graphlayouts_1.2.5   hardhat_1.4.3       
#>  [91] timeDate_4052.112    stringi_1.8.9        yaml_2.3.12         
#>  [94] evaluate_1.0.5       codetools_0.2-20     ggraph_2.2.2        
#>  [97] tibble_3.3.1         BiocManager_1.30.27  cli_3.6.6           
#> [100] uwot_0.2.5           rpart_4.1.27         jquerylib_0.1.4     
#> [103] Rcpp_1.1.2           globals_0.19.1       png_0.1-9           
#> [106] parallel_4.6.1       gower_1.0.2          readr_2.2.0         
#> [109] blob_1.3.0           listenv_1.1.0        glmnet_5.1          
#> [112] viridisLite_0.4.3    ipred_0.9-16         ggridges_0.5.7      
#> [115] scales_1.4.0         prodlim_2026.03.11   crayon_1.5.3        
#> [118] purrr_1.2.2          rlang_1.3.0          KEGGREST_1.53.6