Fused Spatial Latent Block Models for Co-Clustering

Abstract: Spatial transcriptomics is a rapidly growing technique that captures gene expression together with spatial coordinates in intact tissue sections, enabling in situ mapping of transcriptional activity. This technology offers unprecedented opportunities to study tissue heterogeneity and spatial gene expression patterns. Uncovering the associations between spatially variable gene modules and spot types can advance our understanding of pathological mechanisms. However, rigorous statistical methods that exploit spatial information to achieve spatially coherent co-clustering of spots and genes are still lacking, and theoretical investigations in this direction remain limited. We propose a fused spatial latent block model (F-SpLBM). Our model uses the LBM to uncover co-expression patterns between spots and genes, penalized fusion to automatically determine the number of co-clusters, and the Potts model to incorporate spatial information. We establish that the fusion-based procedure recovers the true block structure with the misclassification rate converging at a super-polynomial rate. We also prove asymptotic normality of the parameter estimators and quantify the accuracy gain from spatial smoothing. Simulations and real-data analyses demonstrate that F-SpLBM yields spatially coherent and biologically interpretable clustering results.